Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

-The Times of India   Education minister Brij Kishor Sharma said that the Right to Education Act will be strictly implemented in the state in order to improve quality of education. However, he said that dialogues are open with private and public schools to maintain their structural set-up. The minister came to Ajmer on Thursday to participate in the convocation of Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education held at Jawahar Rang Manch. Overall, 205...

The Supreme Court on Monday posted for final hearing on March 27 a CBI special leave petition against a judgment of the Allahabad High Court, which upheld the dropping of the conspiracy charge by a special court against BJP leaders L. K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and 18 others in the Babri Masjid demolition case. Senior counsel Ravi Shankar Prasad drew the court's attention to the fact that the...

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...

-PTI Salman Rushdie today said he does not need a visa to visit India and the government made it clear it would not stop him from coming. The author, reacting to an Islamic seminary’s opposition to his trip to the country, wrote on Twitter: “Regarding my India visit, for the record, I don’t need a visa.” Yesterday in a statement, Dar-ul Uloom Deoband vice-chancellor Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani said the “Indian government should...