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Why is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), so keen on appropriating the legacy of the “father of the nation” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi? The answer is very simple: the Sangh Parivar or the family of organisations owing allegiance to the RSS, the BJP and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance coalition, the right-wing supporters of Hindutva and the ardent advocates of a Hindu Rashtra, just do not have in their midst a tall...

For several years, a clutch of companies in the Mukesh Ambani-headed Reliance group have been under the scanner of a slow-moving multi-agency investigation by the government of India. At the centre of one of the main strands of the investigation is the D-6 natural gas block in the Krishna-Godavari basin off the coast of Eastern India that Reliance Industries Limited – the Reliance group’s flagship company – operates together with British Petroleum, and a cross-country pipeline that carries gas...

The decision of a bench of the Delhi High Court of comprising Justices D N Patel and C Hari Shankar on Friday September 27, to issue notices to different government bodies – the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and its wings, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) and the Registrar of Companies (RoC), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Housing Bank (NHB) – to investigate the allegations levelled in a public interest...

On September 17, the regulator of the country’s financial markets, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) passed an interim order barring Gautam Thapar, former Chairman of Crompton Greaves (CG) Power and Industrial Solutions Limited from participating in capital market transactions. Similar restrictions were imposed on two former Directors of CG Power, Madhav Acharya and B Hariharan, and the company’s former Chief Financial Officer (CFO), V R Venkatesh. This move has come less than...

Since the arrest of former Union Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in the INX Media case by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on August 21, and even earlier, there has been widespread coverage in the news media about this controversial media organisation. Chidambaram is in judicial custody and lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. In May 2017, the CBI had registered an FIR on the alleged irregularities committed by persons associated with the INX Media group while receiving funds to the...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated that India aspires to generate 100 gigawatt (GW) of solar energy by 2022. He wants the country to become a “ hub” for the manufacture of solar power batteries. Given the recent flip-flops in the government’s tax policies, this goal is unlikely to be easily achieved. An analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think-tank, has concluded that the decision of the Ministry of Finance to impose a safeguard duty on...

The Narendra Modi government’s decision to allow 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in coal mining has been opposed by the Left on the ground it would enable multinational mining companies to “plunder” the country’s mineral resources. Those supporting the move, however, argue that foreign investment in coal mining is needed because the public sector Coal India Limited (CIL) is “over-stretched” and will not be able to increase domestic production substantially to curtail imports. At the same...

On August 16, senior advocate Dushyant Dave wrote to the judges of the Supreme Court of India alleging that two cases involving companies in the Adani group “in complete contravention of the settled practice of the Supreme Court as also its established procedure...were listed, taken up and heard without any justification...causing grave injury to public interest and public revenue.” Dave alleged that “it is disturbing that the Supreme Court of India should take up regular matters of a large...

New Delhi, India - A few days after Jammu and Kashmir's (J&K) special status was eradicated, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the now-abolished Article 370 of India's constitution - the provision that had guaranteed special rights to Muslim-majority J&K – had also hampered its economic development. "There must be investment and job opportunities in Jammu and Kashmir," Modi told CNN-News 18. "No one goes there to invest." Article 370 had bestowed numerous special rights on J&K, including...

Seventy two hours of music with 400,000 people in attendance. Woodstock Music & Art Fair opened in a lush farm in New York on August 15, 1969. Half a century later, it has became the most important festival of its kind for the manner in which it mixed music and politics. An allegory on the loss of innocence of an entire generation of popular musicians in the West, Don McLean’s song American Pie, written and sung for the first time in 1971, had these lines: “Oh, and there we were all in one place...