News18 Daybreak | BJP's Bengal NRC Agenda, Sushma on Doklam Stand-off and Other Stories You May Have Missed
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Bengal NRC: BJP president Amit Shah will hold a rally in Kolkata on August 11 amid clear indications from his party leaders that they will make the alleged presence of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in West Bengal a poll issue and seek an Assam-like NRC there. With Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee holding talks in the national capital with opposition leaders to take on the BJP over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, Shah's proposed rally underscores his intention to build the issue as a major poll plank in her state as Lok Sabha elections are barely eight months away. Incidentally, the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India said on Wednesday that West Bengal where CM Banerjee has kicked up a storm over the exclusion of 40 lakh people from the final draft of NRC in Assam, was the biggest defaulter in the verification process.
Pre-poll plans: As the debate over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) simmered across political circles in the country, causing some serious concern among the Assamese population, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav said that even Saudi Arabia has deported illegal Bangladeshis and Pakistanis but India still hasn’t. Speaking to CNN-News18, Madhav discussed the party’s strategy in dealing with the mammoth issue at hand ahead of the 2019 elections.
Brute leaders: DMK on Wednesday suspended student leaders Yuvaraj and Diwakar from the party a day after the two along with a few others thrashed a hotel’s staffers in Chennai’s Virugambakkam area. They were allegedly beaten for denying food to the DMK leaders because the place had closed.
Toward neutrality: The Supreme Court on Wednesday indicated that it will not make adultery a gender-neutral law and that it will rather examine if it should remain a criminal offence at all. Commencing the hearing on validity of Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), a Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra observed that the law will not be touched to make adultery an offence also for women.
Swaraj speaks: The India-China face-off in Doklam was resolved through "diplomatic maturity without losing any ground" and status quo has been maintained, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Wednesday. Her assurance came a week after reports of increased activity by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Doklam region. A top US official had also warned that China has quietly resumed its activities in the area and neither Bhutan nor India has sought to dissuade it.
Ordeal over: A three-year-old girl who had fallen into a 165-feet deep borewell shaft in her house in Bihar’s Munger was brought out on Wednesday after a rescue operation that lasted close to 31 hours.
New Ayodhya: Uttar Pradesh will soon have a new tourist township near Ayodhya. Proposed to be named ‘Navya Ayodhya’, the township will be spread across 500 acres of land on Faizabad-Gorakhpur National Highway, with an estimated cost of Rs 1,200 crore.
Elections are over in Pakistan. The bloodshed, pre-poll rigging, massive engineering, forced party desertions, discovery of abandoned ballot boxes, torn ballot papers, judicial wrangling - together shroud the results of 2018 elections as one of the dirtiest in our history. However, Wajid Shamsul Hasan writes that the Election Commission of Pakistan’s decision to order recounting of votes in 29 National and Provincial Assembly seats could be a ray of hope.
In November 2017, when YS Jaganmohan Reddy began his padyatra from Kadapa district, he was seen merely as a son taking a leaf out of his father's bestseller. 225 days and 2650 km later, as the strategy team does a post-mortem of the journey so far, the conclusion is that many of the short-term targets have been fulfilled. TS Sudhir writes that that the padyatra has helped identify options for the party leadership at the constituency level.