Innholdsfortegnelse for Monday, June 19, 2023 i India Today

The crowded political arena in Maharashtra just got a little more so with Sambhajiraje Chhatrapati, the scion of the royal family of Kolhapur, announcing his intent to contest the Lok Sabha and state assembly elections due in 2024. He has converted his social organisation, ‘Swarajya’, into a political party of the same name. At a convention of his outfit in Pune on May 28, and amidst slogans like “Maharashtra ka mukhyamantri kaisa ho? Sambhajiraje jaisa ho”, the ex-royal attacked the established political parties for retreating from sectors like education, public health and cooperatives. He promised to “give a different direction to society and Maharashtra”. This is the first time someone with a major royal connection in Maharashtra—Sambhajiraje is the 13th descendant of Chhatrapati Shivaji—is floating his own party. However, erstwhile…

US secretary of defense Lloyd James Austin landed in New Delhi barely two weeks before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to Washington from June 21. According to a US department of defense statement, Austin is in India “to reinforce major defence partnership and advance cooperation in critical domains” between the strategic partners. During his meeting with defence minister Rajnath Singh, a road map for defence industrial cooperation with the goal of fast-tracking technology transfer and co-production was agreed upon. “This initiative aims to change the paradigm for cooperation between the US and Indian defence sectors, including specific proposals that could provide India access to cutting-edge technologies and support India’s defence modernisation plans,” the DoD statement said, adding that both Austin and Rajnath were committed to supporting India’s leading role…

Desperate for a comeback, TDP supremo N. Chandrababu Naidu is trying to stitch up an alliance in Andhra Pradesh for the 2024 assembly election. Actor Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena is onboard, but Naidu is eager to rope in the BJP too. He met Union home minister Amit Shah in Delhi on June 3, the first time after the TDP exited the NDA in 2018. The saffron party is reportedly eager to keep both Naidu and CM Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP in good humour. Never know when you’ll need the numbers, especially with a general election coming up.…

POINTS OF INVESTIGATION Was manual intererfence with the Electronic Interlocking System (EIS), which led to the diversion of the Coromandel Express, an error of judgement or sabotage? Why didn’t the station master and signal inspector carry out the mandatory physical checks to ensure the EIS was functioning normally? Why didn’t the EIS switch on the red signal on sensing an anomaly in the loop line, which put the express on a collision course with the goods train? Were the staff on this busy section of the South Eastern Railway sector overstressed and under pressure to push through trains to avoid delays? UNDER THE SCANNER Station Master Tasked with enforcing compliance with rules, discharge of staff duties Inspects all signals, level crossing gates and station machinery. Promptly reports defects Sole authority…

On June 2, Bharat Rashtra Samithi supremo K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) flagged off the 21-day decennial celebrations to mark the formation of Telangana. The “longest-serving Telugu chief minister” also crisscrossed the state to inaugurate a string of new projects. Of course, this being an election year, KCR spared no effort in highlighting his government’s achievements, and the most visible of these are the irrigation projects. Telangana now irrigates some 7.5 million acres of farmland, and the CM is promising water for another 5 million acres. “This will help us achieve the target of irrigating 12.5 million acres. The progress is there for everyone to see. Our per capita income is now Rs 3.17 lakh, more than double what it was in 2014 when Telangana was formed. The GSDP is Rs…

It was supposed to be a soiree celebrating the birth anniversaries of two great Bengali poets—Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam—in the sprawling nat mandir (dance hall) of Radha Govinda Jiu temple at Nabadwip, in West Bengal’s Nadia district. But, an hour before its start on May 24, amidst sudden commotion, the organisers were made to remove a picture of Nazrul and delete his name from the title—Rabindra-Nazrul Sandhya—by temple authorities. Later, it emerged they had bowed to ‘pressure’ from the BJP, who did not appreciate the celebration of a Muslim poet in a Hindu temple space. The targeting of Nazrul by the BJP has a history. As an icon who in many ways bridges the religious chasm that has scarred Bengal, he may not be particularly easy to villainise,…

They call her the Meerabai of Gen Z. Twenty-seven-year-old Jaya Kishori from Kolkata turns Krishna folktales into 30-second clips to address issues of loneliness, friendship and lack of self-confidence. This has helped ‘Jaya didi’, as she is known, gain over 1.9 million followers on Facebook and another two million on YouTube. Her namesake, Jaya Pandey, a 16-year-old in Delhi, swears by her. “I have to keep shifting schools because my parents are in the army,” says Pandey. “But wherever I go, Jaya didi is with me. I would be lost in the maze of change without her as my guide.” There is also Devi Ushma Kishoriji from Jhansi. Infinitely wise for a 14-year-old, she gets regular leave from school to post new content for her 10,000 followers on Instagram. Most…

India recorded a 7.2 per cent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in the 2022-23 fiscal—exceeding, if marginally, what most economists had anticipated and the Centre’s own estimate of 7 per cent. A major contributing element behind this gentle elevation on the graph has been the 6.1 per cent GDP growth in the last quarter of the fiscal (Q4), which was quite a bit higher than the widely expected 5 per cent. How to read this good news? By all accounts, it’s best that optimism be tempered. There is concern on how sustainable this growth actually is, given that it reflects pent-up demand from the pandemic years. In fact, these numbers are still lower than the 9.1 per cent recorded in FY22, and that number was itself inflated, coming after…

Tribal communities in Goa are becoming increasingly vocal about their political and social rights. Over the past few months, they have upped the ante on one of their long-pending demands—10 per cent political reservation for scheduled tribes (STs) in the Goa legislative assembly and have threatened to boycott the 2024 Lok Sabha polls if this was not met. In 2003, the Gauda, Velip and Kunbi com munities were added to the ST category. Though STs and Scheduled Castes (SCs) have 12 and two per cent quotas respectively in jobs and education, tribals still do not have political reservation. However, SCs have one seat reserved for them in the house—Pernem in North Goa. “We have been deprived of our rights for the last 20 years…if tribals are elected as MLAs from…

How is it that some political figures loom large in our collective memory and yet remain enigmatic, if not little-known? Atal Bihari Vajpayee is certainly one such figure, one of India’s most consequential politicians, not just for the party he steered for more than five decades, but also for the country he played a part in shaping as a political activist, a lifelong RSS member, a party leader, a parliamentarian, and a prime minister. And yet, his life has been reduced to stereotypical notions and snippets: Vajpayee the moderate, the poet-orator, the non-vegetarian, whisky-drinking pracharak, or the right man in the wrong party. Some of these notions, it turns out, are, at best, mild distortions of the truth. Others are misrepresentations of a complex man who, for all his unconventionalities,…

It was around 7 pm on the night of June 2 and Manmath Bhuyan, 48, was relaxing at the home his station master father had built near the Bahanaga Bazar railway station when he heard the loud crashing sounds outside. “I rushed out on hearing the commotion. It was as though a bomb had hit Bahanaga,” he says. Bhuyan’s mother, Dhirodbala, actually thought a wayward missile from the nearby Chandipur-on-sea testing centre had crashed into their sleepy hamlet. They didn’t know it then, but they were in the vicinity of one of India’s deadliest train accidents, which left 288 people dead and another 1,200 injured. The Bahanaga locals were the first responders. “It was dark everywhere,” recalls Bhuyan. “Mutilated bodies lay all around the tracks. We shifted the injured to…

When Asur arrived in early March 2020 on Voot, a new virus had wreaked havoc. For an audience holed up in their homes, the crime thriller, involving CBI officers trying to hunt down a clever, cold-blooded serial killer, became a riveting watch. The shocking end that saw a tragic death and the killer’s identity revealed made viewers wait eagerly for season two. It finally comes three years later, this time on JioCinema. The first episode of Asur 2: Rise of the Dark Side, reconnects audiences with key characters: Dhananjay Rajput a.k.a. DJ (Arshad Warsi) has taken to Buddhism and introspects over his follies with a child in Dharamsala; Nikhil (Barun Sobti), the forensic expert, is dependent on anti-depressants, while his wife, Naina (Anupriya Goenka), also a computer expert, wants a…

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT AN EVENT AS MOMENTOUS and tragic as the Partition of India (and the violence on both sides of the border), the stories therein aren’t restricted to words or even images. There are also physical objects inextricably linked to the event. A skilled curator, therefore, is tasked with sculpting a narrative around these objects—or rather, setting the stage for visitors to carve their own narratives out of this profusion of raw material. New Delhi’s recently opened Partition Museum, at Ambedkar University’s Dara Shikoh Library Building, succeeds in doing this, for the most part. This is the second such museum dedicated to the Partition of India—the first, set up by The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TACHT) in 2016, is in Amritsar. Kishwar Desai, the chair-person of TACHT,…

On the night of May 22, the police in Patna got a tip-off that liquor was being sold out of a flat in Rajaram Apartments in the posh Srikrishna Puri locality. Bihar being a ‘dry state’, the cops quickly arranged a late-night swoop. The raid yielded a lot more than a few liquor bottles—there was Rs 1.8 lakh in counterfeit currency (in Rs 500 and Rs 200 denominations) and banknotes printed on paper sheets, ready to be cut out and circulated. A full counterfeit cottage industry, in fact: printers, paper sheets, a cutting machine and laptop. Three of the accused managed to flee, but the cops arrested two other young men in their 20s—Ayub Khan and Ratan Yadav. Khan, who broke his leg in an abortive bid to escape, is…

For a plan that took five decades from conception to fruition, the expectations surrounding Project Cheetah—dubbed as the first intercontinental translocation of a large wild carnivore—are bound to be high. But after a promising start, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi releasing eight cheetahs brought from Namibia at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh last September, the fanfare has given way to an appreciation of starker realities. Mortality among the spotted felines has led to a reevaluation of the whole project. The first death was reported in late March—a female, Sasha, dying of “renal complications”. But it was soon followed by the news of the birth of four cubs—a first after the big cat was declared extinct in India seven decades ago. The cheer was short-lived, though. In April, Uday, a…

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is betting big on religious tourism to give a facelift to his state, Uttar Pradesh. The success of the Kashi Vishwanath temple corridor, where tourists and pilgrims are descending in hordes, has prompted plans for three new corridors—the Vindhyavasini in Mirzapur, Mathura-Vrindavan and the Nath circuit in Bareilly. Among the three, the Vindhyavasini corridor is where all the focus is currently, with construction work on at war footing. The Vindhyavasini temple, also known as Vindhyachal Dham, is dedicated to the goddess of the same name. One of the Shakti Peetha temples, it is situated on the banks of the river Ganga in Mirzapur district in eastern UP. Besides the beautification of the temple, a 50-feet-wide parikrama route and “world-class facilities” for pilgrims are on the cards.…

Enthused by the Karnataka results, Congress workers in Telangana are hoping the party will recreate the magic there as well in the assembly election later this year. And they are looking to party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi to lead the revival. Suggestions now include her getting a guesthouse in Hyderabad to even contesting the 2024 general election from Medak, from where her grandmother Indira Gandhi won in 1980. The prospect of a Gandhi leading the Congress campaign has not gone down well with the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leaders, who dismiss the Gandhis as “political tourists”. Never mind that party supremo K. Chandrashekar Rao had, in 2014, flown down to Delhi to personally thank Priyanka’s mother and then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi after Telangana got statehood.…

At 9.30 pm on June 2, when Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union minister for railways, landed in Goa to launch the Vande Bharat train from Panjim to Mumbai the next day, the officials who met him at the airport looked unusually grim. Then, they broke the bad news that there had been a triple collision between the Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express, a goods train and the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express at the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, Odisha. Vaishnaw knew the terrain well, having served as the district collector of Balasore in the late 1990s when he had made a name for himself for ensuring there were zero casualties in his jurisdiction during the Super Cyclone of Odisha in 1999. When he heard of the accident, among the first things Vaishnaw did…

EXPENDITURE ON SAFETY-RELATED WORKS The national transporter has spent over Rs 1.7 lakh crore in the past nine years to enhance safety on its ever-expanding network (Figures in Rs crore) EXPENDITURE ON TRACK RENEWALS The Rs 1.09 lakh crore spend on it made track renewal a major chunk of safety-related works (Figures in Rs crore) TRAIN ACCIDENTS AND PASSENGER FATALITIES Balasore’s death toll of 288 alone is higher than that recorded throughout any year since FY2005. Barring an uptick in FY2023, the no. of train accidents has been on a decline in recent years KEY INITIATIVES TO MAKE TRAINS SAFE Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh Created in 2017-18 for five years with annual contribution of Rs 20,000 cr To fund the replacement/renewal/upgradation of critical safety assets Extended for another five years…

“Kerala tells a remarkable tale of social harmony, equitable growth and progressive values. With its unique model of inclusive development, Kerala has emerged as an exemplar of people-centric progress”PINARAYI VIJAYAN Chief Minister, Kerala For a place with such lush green feathers in its crown, it was only a matter of time before the India Today Conclave South came to Kerala. In 2016, it was already the first state in India to achieve 100 per cent literacy. Last month, Kerala also became the first state to be fully e-governed. Its neighbours are also not far behind when it comes to socio-economic progress. So, it was only fitting when India Today Group Editorial Director (Publishing), Raj Chengappa, in his opening remark at the conclave, lauded the region as the ‘Incredible South’ for…

One of the major attractions at India’s newly-constructed Parliament complex is the Shilp Deergha, part of the ground floor galleries and designed to exhibit the various arts and crafts forms from across India—whether it is embroidery, textile work, metal sculptures, block printing or terracotta. The Shilp Deergha, conceptualised by Jaya Jaitly (founder and president of the Dastkari Haat Samiti) has been divided into eight parts, which correspond to eight philosophical concepts, namely, Gyan (knowledge), Prakriti (nature), Aastha (faith), Ullas (joy), Parv (festival), Samrasta (unity), Swavlamban (self-reliance), and Yatra (journey). “I have been working with craftspeople across the country for a long time,” says Jaitly. “This was a huge opportunity for me and, funnily, it wasn’t very tough. Once I started working on the concept, the idea of the eight parts…