Politics News Updates

Every time there is a Rajya Sabha election round the corner, lobbying gathers momentum. Apart from politicians who have failed to win or have little hope of winning a direct election (to the Lok Sabha or Vidhan Sabha), there are countless others – industrialists, activists, journalists, actors and so on – who make a beeline […]

A few months back, a friend from the university days called up. I was a trifle intrigued because he rarely bothers calling though we live and work in the same city. The friend, a senior executive in a leading corporate house with stakes in the lucrative mining sector in the state, started with small talk […]

The accolades have been pouring in from all over the place. Hockey stars like Viren Rasquinha, PR Sreejesh and Dillip Tirkey have hailed the move as the dawn of a new era in India’s national game with Tirkey dubbing it as a sign of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s commitment to Indian hockey. Most Odias have […]

Mercifully, it has now been taken down. But that does not diminish the gravity of the situation. That a Facebook group calling itself ‘Hindutva Varta’ has the audacity to publish a list of 102 girls who, according to it, are either ‘victims of love jihad or are in the process of becoming so’ and openly […]

What exactly has happened to Rajeswari (Mita) Kamila? What rendered the woman, who was fit enough to throw eggs at the Chief Minister’s dais during the Talasari beach festival on Wednesday, so sick that she had to be shifted to the SCB Medical College on Monday? Did the BJD workers beat her up so severely? […]

After two back-to-back, thumping wins thousands of miles apart by the Indian cricket team over the last 24 hours, it is perhaps time to ponder over the question: is it the golden era of Indian cricket? Given that we were beaten 2-1 in the Test series against South Africa, the question may seem out of […]

When your intentions are not above board, you invariably end up tying yourself in knots. And that is what the BJD and the state government have done in two separate cases: the suicide by the Kunduli victim and the suspension of Kendrapara MP Baijyant Panda from the party. The startling revelation this evening by OTV […]

It is not easy being a journalist in these polarized times, more so if you write opinion pieces. You write something that goes even remotely against a party, a leader or a school of thought and the trolls would pounce on you like a pack of wolves, ready to tear you into pieces in no […]

The victim of the Kunduli ‘gang rape that wasn’t’ could not have chosen a worse time to commit suicide. Conspiracy theorists in government and ruling party circles may even be looking for an ‘opposition design’ in the suicide on a day when Naveen Patnaik was making a triumphant return to the state capital after being […]

On the face of it, the rebellion of sorts by the four honourable judges of the Supreme Court concerns procedural issues in the way the Supreme Court has been functioning of late. But one just has to look closely at the reactions of various people, including politicians and legal luminaries, to this unprecedented act by […]

Everyone talks about him. But for some strange reason, no one names him. Rarely has an officer – and that too one not belonging to the senior echelons of the bureaucracy – enjoyed so much clout. Even more rarely has someone who has so consciously and scrupulously stayed away from public glare been the centre […]

There are two ways in which Laloo Prasad Yadav is viewed outside Bihar depending on the social (read caste) origins, educational accomplishments and political leanings of the person concerned. People belonging to the ‘lower’ or backward classes, especially the undereducated among them, see him as their messiah, who has waged a long, courageous and unrelenting […]

These days, the term ‘paid media’ is used in abandon – and more often than not by people who know nothing about the working or economics of the media business. Fake, motivated reports, pictures and videos from dubious sources are shared liberally on social media by people with the mandatory comment “Paid media will never […]

Yesterday, the Mahila Police Station in Bhubaneswar registered a case of rape against Saubhagya Swain, the inspector-in-charge (IIC) of the General Railway Police (GRP) station in the capital city, based on an FIR lodged by the victim, a lady sub inspector (SI) who worked under his alleged rapist at the time of the incident. Her […]

Arvind Kejriwal has come a long way since he burst into public consciousness with his pioneering work on the Right to Information (RTI), which won him the coveted Raman Magsaysay award, and then ignited the whole country as the chosen lieutenant of Anna Hazare during the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement in 2010-11. Today, his […]