The mask is off. Team Anna and his lieutenants are batting for the BJP On 30 October last year, when Mohan Bhagwat claimed that Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement was actually supported by the RSS, the remark conveyed palpable nervousness and attracted criticism from Team Anna. Three months later, as Team Anna launches its voters’ awareness campaign in UP, there is not even an attempt to keep its secular mask intact. The mask,...

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...

In the past week the media has been reporting that the SIT has filed a closure report that gives a “clean chit” to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on the grounds that there is no prosecutable evidence against him. However, Tehelka has now scooped amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran’s explosive confidential report that had told the Supreme Court that Modi should be chargesheeted and prosecuted for serious criminal offences like promoting religious...

Kamal Chauhan was part of cell that planted the incendiary devices, NIA sources say Less than a week short of the fifth anniversary of the firebombing of the Samjhauta Express, detectives of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) have held a Madhya Pradesh resident on suspicion of having participated in the terrorist cell which carried out the attack — the first breakthrough in over a year against a core group of fugitives...

-PTI   Former Gujarat DGP, RB Sreekumar on Thursday slammed the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) for allegedly taking a pro-Narendra Modi line in the probe into the 2002 riots cases, to shield him from the prosecution. In an open letter to the people, Sreekumar, who headed the State Intelligence Bureau (SIB) during the riots period, has also made public his first statement before the SIT in May 2008.   He had then talked...