-The Indian Express Chief Minister Narendra Modi has blamed the high level of malnutrition in Gujarat on the predominantly vegetarian diet in the state and the “middle-class” being “more beauty conscious than health conscious”. In an interview to The Wall Street Journal, replying to a question on what he was doing to check malnutrition, Modi has been quoted as saying: “Gujarat is by and large a vegetarian state. And secondly, Gujarat is...

-The Hindu The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority...

-The Indian Express Ahmedabad: Former BJP minister Maya Kodnani was on Wednesday held guilty along with 31 others in the Naroda Patiya massacre case, becoming the first MLA to be convicted for the 2002 Gujarat riots. The special riot court also convicted Babubhai Patel alias Babu Bajrangi in what was the worst massacre of the riots, leaving 97 dead. The court let off 29 of the 61 accused, giving them the benefit...

-The Indian Express The arc of history may finally be bending towards justice for the victims of communal violence that gripped Gujarat in 2002. Thirty-two people, including Maya Kodnani, formerly women and child development minister in the Narendra Modi government, and Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader, were convicted by a special court in Gujarat for their roles in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad. This is the first time, after exhaustive...

-The Telegraph Ahmedabad, Aug. 25: A chain of farmer suicides in Saurashtra and the Congress’s initiatives to reach out to affected families appear to have put the Narendra Modi regime on the backfoot ahead of the Gujarat elections. Twelve farmers have died in the drought-hit region in the past month. But the government is still in denial mode, claiming the “deaths are not related to crop failure” and that more farmers commit...