Featured News

From Partition to Muzaffarnagar, the history of riots has been a celebration of rape. Muzaffarnagar sounds like it’s a part of the UP badlands, while pundits hair-split words like responsibility and secularism.

December was a game-changer for the Congress since it finally woke up to the unfavourable ground realities which its myopic leaders had ignored largely because of the blindness caused by their socialistic baggage.

However, as in the case of the nuclear deal in 2008, which might not have received the Congress’ approval but for Rahul Gandhi’s intervention, it was the heir apparent who again chose the right path by correctly interpreting the reason for the party’s electoral drubbing in the four north and central Indian states.

Apane ko chaiwala kyun kehta hai tu

Baat-baat mein natak kyun karta hai tu

Chaiwalon ko kyun badnaam karata hai tu

Saaf-saaf bata de! kiski chai bechata hai tu!

(Why do you call yourself a teaseller Why do you act and lie all the time Why do you give a bad name to teasellers
Say it clearly! Whose tea do you sell!)

Khoon lagakar anguthe mein shahid hota hai

Aur corporate mafia mein masiha dekhta hai

Ambani-Adani ki dalali se ‘vikas’ karata hai

Arre badmash bata de! kiski chai bechata hai tu!

Himachal’s popular tourist resorts Manali, Narkanda and Kalpa are wrapped up in a thick blanket of snow, making the hill stations more picturesque for New Year Eve revellers.

Members of the hospitality industry say it’s the last week’s snow that has surged the tourist footfall, which is likely to cross the 50,000-mark across the state to celebrate the coming of New Year.

Met Office director Manmohan Singh told IANS Sunday that the minimum temperature at most places that saw snow stayed close to sub-zero.

“There are chances of rainfall and snowfall at some places Dec 30-31,” he said.

Travails of Zakia Jafri Ram Puniyani The metropolitan court on 26th December 2013 exonerated Narendra Modi and 59 others for their complicity in the Gujarat carnage. Fully accepting the report of SIT (Special Investigation Team) the court endorsed the view of Modi and Government about their role in the carnage. The Court rejected a petition seeking the prosecution of Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the 2002 communal riots case. There were varied reactions to this. Mrs Jafri broke down but vowed to continue her legal battle. She has alleged that Mr.

With his boy-next-door persona and understated style, Farooq Sheikh made his entry into films at a time when the parallel art cinema was making its presence felt and he went on to work in some of the best movies of that era.

Sheikh passed away in Dubai late last night after a heart attack. He is survived by wife Rupa and daughters Shaista and Sanaa.

As someone who trained as a lawyer, Sheikh came to acting after failing to relate to his profession in law. Theatre was something that he was already doing in college.

At the Malakpur relief camp in Shamli district of western Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest of the dozen-odd for the victims of the riots that erupted in September, children run about barefoot in the cold and damp, with little protection from the bitter winter chill.

It’s over three months after rioting in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, just about 100 km from the national capital, displaced at least 50,000 people. The displaced, mostly Muslims, live under just plastic sheets held up with bamboo sticks.

Lakh Bawdi, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district, 20 km from Muzaffarnagar town, is surrounded on three sides by harvest-ready fields of sugarcane as high as the average Indian, and a pond on the fourth. The joke in north India is that there is no better place to hide an abducted person than in a harvest-ready sugarcane field.

Much like US-India relations, US President Barack Obama had a roller coaster ride in the year gone by, as he scored a couple of successes abroad, but fumbled with the ball in the rollout of his signature healthcare law.

Obama wouldn’t admit that 2013 was the worst year of his presidency as he left for his annual Hawaii holiday with nothing ticked on his “to do list” from immigration reform to jobs to tax reform to gun control in the wake of the “massacre of innocents” in a Newtown school.

There are no dearth of experts critical of the Aam Aadmi Party and its leaders. Much before Arvind Kejriwal could step into the chief minister’s office, they aired views ranging from scepticism to downright condemnation. No other political party in recent history has faced such scrutiny.

Let’s take the extremely cynical prediction of many commentators that AAP and its top leaders are going to fail. Their criticism basically revolves round a few specious arguments; that they are inexperienced, that they have a skewed vision of the future and that they promise too much.

The Coalition Against Genocide (CAG – http://coalitionagainstgenocide.org/), today published “Part II” of its report on Hindu American Foundation (HAF) titled “Affiliations of Faith – Joined at the Hip” – with further evidence of HAF leadership’s ties and dedication to the global Hindu Nationalist Movement that functions under a conglomerate of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar.

India’s over 1,000 fast track courts, set up for moving the wheels of justice faster, have decided more than 3.2 million cases in the past 11 years, but a whopping 32 million cases are still pending, according to available official data.

Law and Justice Minister Kapil Sibal said in the Lok Sabha that a total of 3,292,785 cases were disposed of by the 1,192 Fast Track Courts (FTCs) till March 2011. He said there are more than 32 million pending cases in high courts and subordinate courts across the country.

For Dhanita Devi, 22, life took a tragic turn six months ago when the flash floods that hit the pilgrim town of Kedarnath in Uttarakhand washed away her hopes and dreams. Her husband of six years died, leaving her alone to take care of the three children.

The story is the same of Meera Tiwari, 26, who also lost her husband, a priest at the Kedarnath shrine.

The Federal Open Market Committee’s announcement Wednesday to reduce the Federal Reserve’s monthly purchases of Mortgage Backed Securities and Treasuries of $85 billion a month to $75 billion a month came as a surprise to many market participants.

The contrast cannot be greater. December 16 is celebrated by Bangladesh as “Victory Day” and observed in Pakistan as “the Fall of Dhaka”.

This year, there was a bit of poetic justice too. On December 16, more than 27,000 Bangladeshis formed the largest human national flag, consigning to the waste-paper basket, the record held by – you guessed it – Pakistan.

The Coalition Against Genocide (CAG – http://coalitionagainstgenocide.org/), today released a new report Affiliations of Faith: Hindu American Foundation and the Global Sangh – that documents HAF’s deep imbrication within the Global Hindutva movement.

(By Monish Gulati) A physiotherapy student was raped and tortured by five men and a juvenile in a moving bus in New Delhi Dec 16, 2012. Later the young woman and a male friend who was accompanying her were thrown off the bus by the rapists. The woman succumbed to her injuries Dec 29 in a Singapore hospital. In a TV interview her male friend said that three Police Control Room (PCR) vans had arrived at the scene after about 45 minutes and spent time in debating the police station under whose jurisdiction the case would fall.

Trials in fast-track courts are running at a snail’s pace compared to last year. Six fast-track courts in Delhi, designated for speedy disposal of sexual offences cases, have disposed of only around 400 cases till the end of November. At least 1,090 sexual offence cases are still pending.

Interestingly, regular courts last year decided over 500 such cases compared to fast-track courts, according to statistics from Delhi courts.

Human Rights activist Organizations have been claiming that Indian bureaucracy has been promoting saffron mentality and functioning on their agenda but it has now been proved that the saffron minded officials were present the Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India due to which Muslim youths were targeted.

Despite several representations, Home Ministry did not pay heed to it. Former Home Secretary, Mr. R.K. Singh joined BJP which is a proof that the claims of the Social Activist were true.

A political party established in November 2012 became a ray of hope for voters in Delhi. Kejriwal went on to defeat three-time Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

Delhiites disillusioned with corruption and poor governance put their faith in the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Kejriwal, an engineer by training and a former joint commissioner with the income tax department. His single-minded, focussed approach to fighting corruption helped him to create a paradigm shift in Indian politics. India is ranked 94th among 177 nations in the global corruption index by Transparency International.

(Shaikh Azizur Rahman) After taking off her silver armband embossed with the word “Allah” in Arabic, Ayesha Begum puts red-and-white conch bangles on her wrists and vermillion powder on her forehead – the signs of a traditional Hindu woman in eastern India.

Begum, a Muslim, changes her appearance every morning before she leaves her home, 50km east of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state, where she works as a housekeeper in a private hospital.

Coalition Against Genocide has condemned the Hindu American Foundation’s opposition to House Resolution H.Res. 417 [1] through a smear campaign against the coalition and one of its constituents, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and through its bogus claims about the roots of sectarian violence in India. H.Res 417 praises India’s “rich religious diversity and commitment to tolerance and equality,” while raising concerns over the erosion of religious freedom.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has developed advanced surveillance techniques giving it the power to secretly activate web cameras to spy.

Tech savvy G-men can remotely turn on cameras that transmit real-time images to investigators, without turning on the light that shows the camera is in use. According to the New York Post, the FBI can also carry out surveillance into a suspect”s computer and download files, photographs and stored e-mails.

Siasat Urdu Daily has started a campaign for minimizing expenditure on marriage by making it simpler. This proposal needs serious consideration by the Muslim society.

A seminar was held at Azam Function Hall at Azampura in Old City by Millath-e- Islamia Welfare Society in collaboration with Siasat Urdu Daily.

In India, an automobile has to have an insurance policy but not an individual. Perhaps it is time each individual should have a term life insurance policy based on his income levels, says a top official of a private life insurance company.

“When an automobile is mandated to have an insurance policy why not an individual mandated to have a term insurance cover. The premium outgo will be very small,” Anup Rau, chief executive officer at Reliance Life Insurance Company, told IANS.