category_outlined / News & Politics
India Today
June 24, 2019India Today is the leading news magazine and most widely read publication in India. The magazine’s leadership is unquestioned, so much so that India Today is what Indian journalism is judged by, for its integrity and ability to bring unbiased and incisive perspective to arguably the most dynamic, yet perplexing, region in the world. Breaking news and shaping opinion, it is now a household name and the flagship brand of India’s leading multidimensional media group. Additionally, the weekly brings with it a range supplements like Women, Home, Aspire, Spice and Simply which focus on style, health, education, fashion, etc. and Indian cities.
IN THIS ISSUE
editor-in-chief
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP won the battle of 2019 by pulverising their opponents and earning another five-year term. His government now has to win the war—to fix a rapidly slowing economy. The prime minister began his first day at work with government estimates of a decelerating economy and of India losing its tag of being the world’s fastest growing large economy. The GDP estimate for the January-March quarter of financial year 2018-19 was 5.8 per cent, the lowest in the past five financial years. The 6.8 per cent GDP estimate for FY2018-19 was less than the 7.2 per cent of the previous financial year. It’s a gloomy picture wherever you look. Economic activity across sectors is in the grip of a slowdown. Agriculture, hit by back-to-back droughts between 2014…
india today
CHAIRMAN AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Aroon Purie VICE CHAIRPERSON: Kalli Purie GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Raj Chengappa GROUP CREATIVE EDITOR: Nilanjan Das; GROUP PHOTO EDITOR: Bandeep Singh MANAGING EDITORS: Kai Jabir Friese, Rajesh Jha CONSULTING EDITOR: Ajit Kumar Jha (Research) EXECUTIVE EDITORS: S. Sahaya Ranjit, Sandeep Unnithan MUMBAI: M.G. Arun DEPUTY EDITORS: Prachi Bhuchar, Uday Mahurkar, Manisha Saroop HYDERABAD: Amarnath K. Menon CHANDIGARH: Asit Jolly SENIOR EDITORS: Shweta Punj, Sasi Nair JAIPUR: Rohit Parihar SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Kaushik Deka, Ashish Mukherjee MUMBAI: Suhani Singh, Kiran Dinkar Tare; PATNA: Amitabh Srivastava ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Shougat Dasgupta, Chinki Sinha KOLKATA: Romita Sengupta; BHOPAL: Rahul Noronha; THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Jeemon Jacob ASSISTANT EDITOR: Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri PUNE: Aditi S. Pai PHOTO DEPARTMENT: Vikram Sharma (Deputy Photo Editor), Rajwant Singh Rawat, Yasir Iqbal (Principal Photographers), Chandra Deep Kumar (Senior Photographer); MUMBAI: Mandar Suresh Deodhar (Chief Photographer), Danesh Adil Jassawala (Photographer); KOLKATA: Subir Halder (Principal Photographer); CHENNAI: N.G. Jaison (Senior…
playing at peace and making war
Pakistan finds itself trapped between a rock and a hard place. Left to its own devices, its preferred option for dealing with India would still likely be to continue the policy of using state-sponsored terrorists to ‘soften’ India. This, in Pakistan’s calculations, would force India to come to the negotiating table in a weakened position. So what explains the change of approach, the new desperation to seek dialogue? In the run-up to the just-concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan premier Imran Khan reached out to his Indian counterpart at least three times in the space of a couple of weeks after the BJP’s electoral victory—first in a tweet, then a phone call and finally, on June 7, a letter. The letter renewed Pakistan’s offer to hold a…
the iaf’s airplane crisis
The Indian Air Force (IAF) located the wreckage of its An-32 transport aircraft on June 11 in Arunachal Pradesh’s Siang district, eight days after it went missing in the state. The search for the eight air crew and five passengers on board continues. The sturdy twin-engined Soviet-built transport aircraft is believed to have crashed for reasons still unknown. The aircraft had taken off from Jorhat in Assam on June 3 and was en route to the Mechuka Advanced Landing Ground in Arunachal Pradesh near the border with Tibet. The discovery of the wreckage after days of anxious searches by ISRO satellites, IAF fighter jets, naval reconnaissance aircraft and an R&AW spy plane, was a thin silver lining to a very dark cloud. This is the 10th aircraft the IAF has…
accident-prone iaf?
The year has been a difficult one for the IAF. Just about half way in, 22 personnel have died and 10 aircraft have been lost. Missing for over a week, the wreckage of an Antonov An-32 plane was found in Arunachal Pradesh. A decade ago, another An-32 had gone missing under similar circumstances in the state. Also underway is an investigation into the ‘friendly fire’ between India and Pakistan that resulted in a helicopter crash in Kashmir on February 27. A MiG-21 Bison was downed and IAF wing commander Abhinandan Varthaman was briefly taken captive the same day. In January, a Jaguar fighter crashed in UP and just days later a Mirage crashed at the Bengaluru HAL airport, where, also, at a practice for an air show, two Surya Kiran…
india: a project mishandled
Almost a week after the BJP’s emphatic re-election, a still giddy Ram Madhav wrote a newspaper column in which he excoriated the “pseudo-secular/ liberal cartels that held a disproportionate sway and stranglehold over the intellectual and policy establishment of the country”. Madhav follows up his insecure little tantrum with a threat—odd when you consider that Hindutva has been the country’s prevailing ideology since at least 2014 and the likes of Sadhvi Pragya are elected to Parliament, and Yogi Adityanath is chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the subject of sycophantic profiles. “Under Modi-II,” Madhav writes, metaphorically rubbing his hands with relish, “the remnants of that cartel need to be discarded from the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual landscape.” As Arundhati Roy pointed out in a recent interview in The New Republic,…
