India Today Monday, May 15, 2023

Through the Covid-19 pandemic that inaugurated this decade, there was one refrain that we occasionally heard from health experts with their ear to the ground. That while the newly minted SARS-Cov-2 virus indeed caused a strange and often lethal form of flu, India could not afford to focus its periscope exclusively on its control. For, a much older affliction still stalked the land, silently exacting a consistently high toll: tuberculosis. The spectre of TB not only continues to haunt India, it has been sharpening its knife-edge with a vengeance and coming for us in newer and more dangerous ways. Already we bear a big part of the global disease burden. Not only does India account for almost a quarter of the 10 million people afflicted with TB annually across the…

After a gap of almost four years, a major Maoist attack took place in Dantewada in South Chhattisgarh, where left-wing extremists triggered an improvised explosive device (IED) on April 26, killing 10 security personnel and their civilian driver. While bigger and deadlier incidents have rocked Chhattisgarh in the past, the April 26 incident corresponded with claims by the security establishment—perhaps resulting from a lull in violence—that Maoism was on its last legs in the state. What really happened on April 26? From their Dantewada district headquarters, a party of District Reserve Guard (DRG)—a state force raised for anti-Maoist operations—and Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) personnel left for Aranpur in the intervening night of April 25 and 26 after receiving specific inputs on Maoist presence. Around 6.30 a.m., an engagement took place…

On April 24, when Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar came to meet Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow as part of his efforts to push for Opposition unity, he did not meet Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati. Since meeting one former CM of Uttar Pradesh and not the other seemed to leave an obvious gap in his quest, journalists quizzed Nitish about it, but he chose to remain silent. Sources close to them claim that it was in fact ‘Behanji’, as the BSP chief is popularly known, who was reluctant to meet the Bihar CM. Mayawati’s strategy—more of a dilemma, in this case—is now out in the open. She cannot be seen standing with a united Opposition that has the SP as its key constituent at a…

Amillennium-old connec tion was revived rec ently when Saurashtra Tamils visited the old homeland they had migrated from centuries ago, and took in its wonders. Kicked off in mid-April by defence minister Rajnath Singh in the temple town of Somnath, some 5,000 visitors, who still hold on to their customs and even speak a version of Gujarati called Saurashtri, visited the state as part of the Saurashtra-Tamil Sangamam, a quasi-political programme organised by the Gujarat government, between April 17-27. The genesis of the ‘sangamam’ event is an important slice of forgotten history. Between 1000 and 1024 AD, Turkish invader Mahmud of Ghazni plundered the temple town Somnath 17 times. To escape the violence, several local communities migrated from Prabhas-Patan in the coastal peninsula of Saurashtra, which comprises 13 districts. These…

In what is seen as a battle of wits with nephew Ajit Pawar, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar dropped a bombshell on May 2, saying he intends to quit as party president. The announcement, at the launch of an updated edition of his biography, comes at a time when Ajit is said to be in talks with the BJP, leading to a flux within the NCP. Though Ajit vehemently denies the reports, sources say things could pick up pace after the Karnataka assembly election and the Supreme Court verdict on the cases regarding the June 2022 change of guard in Mah arashtra, where Eknath Shinde and his band of rebels toppled the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition of which the NCP was a part. An NCP group feeling…

On March 16, shortly after 13-year-old Tushar, a Class 6 student, went missing from his house in Patna’s Kanhauli village, his father, Raj Kishore Pandit, received a ransom call on WhatsApp. The kidnapper wanted Pandit, a government schoolteacher, to pay up Rs 40 lakh for the safe return of his son. Three days later, police recovered the boy’s charred body from a secluded spot and arrested the alleged perpetrator—Mukesh Pandey, 28, who ran a coaching centre and private school in the same locality. Police claim Pandey, confronted by private moneylenders from whom he had borrowed Rs 20 lakh, found an easy target in his former student Tushar, who unsuspectingly accompanied the accused only to be strangled to death, his body later burnt to hide evidence. Pandey then allegedly started sending…