The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), the apex body of Indian Muslims, is venting its ire against the Congress-led UPA government after it got no response to its demands for amendments in Right to Education (RTE) Act, Waqf Property and Direct Taxes Code Bills. Though the board has been holding meetings across the country to mobilise public opinion since June 2011, the campaign has been intensified in the poll-bound...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...

BJP chief minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda has said he wants the Bhagvad Gita taught in schools across Karnataka, reviving a touchy subject. Prodded by the BJP government, several schools run by Hindu organisations have been holding Gita classes since January 2011 in parts of the state, which has seen attacks on Christians and churches by Hindutva groups in the past three years. The latest statement, coming from the chief minister himself and...

-The Times of India   The state chapter of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind that is planning a huge rally on January 5 at Nizam College grounds demanded on Tuesday that madrassas (religious schools) in the country be kept out of the purview of the Right to Education Act. Jamiat's state unit president Hafiz Peer Shabbir, who is also a member of the Legislative Council, told mediapersons that the government had not yet evolved a...

The quantum is well below expectations of Muslims who have been pressing for exclusive reservation of 10% The Union government's much-anticipated quota-within-quota sop for minorities as a whole has left Muslim groups confused and groping for answers. On Thursday, the Union Cabinet marked off 4.5 percentage points from within the 27 per cent OBC Central quota, allocating the share to Religious Minorities, among them Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Jains. (In the 2001...