“What should be covered must be covered. Women should not trouble others by wearing jeans,” KJ Yesudas declared in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday, setting off a storm of protests from political leaders, women’s groups and the public. His comments were also criticised on social media, with some users posting photographs of the singer’s daughters-in-law wearing jeans as evidence of his “hypocrisy”.   read more

Last week’s high-handed police action against a peaceful protest by students of Jadavpur University in Kolkata have now taken on a political hue, with the ruling Trinamool Congress under pressure for reportedly cracking down on democratic dissent. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, created a furore on Monday by alleging on Facebook that students were unhappy with the banning of alcohol and drugs on campus.   read more

An alleged sting video by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has thrown Delhi politics into disarray and dealt a serious blow to the BJP’s chances of forming a state government. Both the Congress and AAP want a fresh election in Delhi as they fancy their chances, given that food inflation has remained high since May and there have been power shortages in the capital, which may have dented the BJP’s popularity.   read more

The director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) allegedly had private meetings at home with businessmen and politicians who were being investigated by his agency, on several occasions, sometimes late at night. With growing calls for Ranjit Sinha to recuse himself from his agency’s ongoing investigation into the 2G and coal allocation scams, the government is also considering modifying the law to allow a CBI director to be fired on the grounds of proven misbehaviour.   read more

Three chief ministers of states ruled by opposition parties have found to their discomfiture just what the people think of their administration. It began with Haryana’s Bhupinder Hooda ,who was booed by the crowd when Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of a power plant last week. The Congress has now told all its chief ministers to avoid public engagements with Modi, but the party is being seen as hyper-sensitive instead of taking public heckling in its stride.   read more

Parliament building was witness to unruly scenes as MPs of two regional parties – Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Telugu Desam (TDP) – squabbled over a room that has been allotted to TMC but has been in the possession of TDP for 30 years. This political game of musical chairs has affected several regional parties following the recent election, as parties with reduced parliamentary seats are often finding their room allotted to another party.   read more

The controversy in May over the educational qualifications of Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani was reignited on Saturday after she claimed she has a degree from Yale University. Irani did not provide any details of her “degree”, but media reports indicate that she was one of the 11 Indian members of Parliament who went to Yale in June last year for a six-day leadership program.   read more

The NDA government’s piecemeal attempt to cool the protests over the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) examination has backfired, with students still unhappy that the government has merely excluded the marks earned in English from being counted in the civil services aptitude test (CSAT), and not actually scrapped the test itself. They claim that the examination format is loaded against non-English-speaking applicants.   read more

Hindu activist Dinanath Batra, who was responsible in February for forcing Penguin India to pulp Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism, now finds himself at the centre of a controversy surrounding his own textbooks that have been supplied to schools in Gujarat. These have been criticized as “fantasy” books for preaching about ancient India, using anecdotes such as a royal couple being blessed with children only after cow-worship, and for redrawing the map of India to include its neighbours.   read more

First a Shiv Sena MP forces a fasting Muslim to eat at a state guesthouse; when it reaches the news, the MP initially denies this incident took place; then when a video surfaces the MP apologises, but claims that he had no idea the staffer was a Muslim; a day later, his party’s mouthpiece declares that the food in the guesthouse was an insult to ‘Marathi people’ and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra should be force-fed this food. Can the Shiv Sena not give up its thuggish mentality?   read more

State politics in Karnataka have been shaken with revelations that former chief minister and Janata Dal (Secular) leader H D Kumaraswamy allegedly demanded a bribe from a party leader who wanted to be elected to the Legislative Council. What is novel is that following the expose Kumaraswamy has tried to brazen it out, claiming that since no transaction had actually taken place he had not committed “a grave crime.”   read more

A forensic doctor battling for his position, a socialite wife of a minister who dies in mysterious circumstances, and a landmark change in government – all this adds up to a whodunit that even Hercule Poirot would find baffling.   read more

In a shocking sign of the worsening political climate in West Bengal, Tapas Pal, a Trinamool Congress member of Parliament, reportedly made a public speech threatening his political opponents with “rape” and death. While his party has distanced itself from his remarks, it has not yet taken any action against the MP.   read more

The new NDA administration has got off to a rocky start in its attempt to purge all institutions of political appointees from the previous UPA administration. Seven state governors appointed by the UPA have been informally asked to resign. But by following the practice begun by the UPA when it came to power in 2004, the NDA risks undermining the institution of governor itself.   read more

The Modi government has sparked off a linguistic confrontation with its directive to use Hindi on social media and in official correspondence instead of English. English and Hindi are both the official languages of the Indian government, but the new emphasis on Hindi is being seen by southern politicians as the “imposition of Hindi”.   read more