All India Ulama & Mashaikh Board general secretary Maulana Syed Mohd Ashraf Kachochavi made a strong pitch for a Madrasa Board saying: “Right now the madrasas are under the control of Wahabi-inspired organisations which run on Saudi money. The ideology they teach and spread is hardline Wahabism. These organisations have put pressure on the government not to enact the Act. We want the funds to go to the really needy...

-The Times of India   Cracks have appeared in Team Anna just a couple of months after they pushed the political class to agree to create a strong Lokpal and galvanized popular opinion against corruption, as members pursue their individual agendas. On Friday, Anna Hazare and other members of the group distanced themselves from their comrade Prashant Bhushan's advocacy to allow a plebiscite in Kashmir Valley on whether it should remain with India,...

-The Indian Express   Reflecting a rift within Team Anna Hazare, Justice Santosh Hegde has disapproved of the anti-Congress campaign by Arvind Kejriwal during Hisar bypolls, saying it was not the right thing to do and "we jumped the gun". Hegde, who was a representative of Team Anna in the Joint Drafting Committee on Lokpal Bill, also took a dig at Kejriwal for his remarks that Hazare was above Parliament, observing that such...

-The Telegraph   Amartya Sen today blamed “bureaucratic controls” for the delay in release of funds for the upcoming Nalanda University in Bihar. He said the university would teach only two courses to start with because of funds shortage but hoped that in future, it would go beyond teaching to do research as well. Sen felt that Indian universities’ track record in research was a crucial reason why not even one of them...

The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...