Front Page
Life imprisonment for Asaram: Early afternoon Wednesday, self-styled ‘godman’ Asaram Bapu was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a 16-year-old devotee in 2013, as all major dailies report on their front page. Soon after his conviction, his supporters took to social media to defend him. Read The Times of India’s coverage to get a sense of the timeline.
Centre strays from precedent on judicial appointments: Late Wednesday night, news broke that the Modi government had approved the appointment of senior advocate Indu Malhotra as a Supreme Court judge, while continuing to ignore the SC collegium’s recommendation to elevate Uttarakhand High Court Chief Justice K.M. Joseph. We don’t know yet if CJI Dipak Misra was consulted, but one thing is clear, “the Centre has gone against legal opinion” as well as precedent, and the Supreme Court will not be happy, Maneesh Chhibber reports for ThePrint. A small cause for celebration, however, is the fact that Malhotra is the first woman lawyer to be elevated directly to the SC.
End to India’s oldest insurgency may be round the corner. The Indian Express reports that the draft of the Naga peace accord is nearly final, with “removal of AFSPA, no change in state boundary”. Only one thing reportedly remains to be decided upon — the demand for a separate state flag. The agreement hopes to finally bring India’s oldest insurgency to a close, but the “government is apprehensive about a violent reaction in the Manipur valley to the signing of the accord”.
So, if you linked your mobile phone with your Aadhaar ID, it turns out you didn’t have to. In what looks like a game of Chinese whispers, the “government misinterpreted Supreme Court’s 6 February 2017 observation” and insisted on Aadhaar-mobile number linking. “There was no direction by the court…” Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said during a hearing, as The Times of India reports.
Meanwhile, Hindustan Times gives us a look at the future of polling. “The Election Commission launched Wednesday its third-generation electronic voting machines (EVMs). The device will be tried at 1,800 polling booths in Karnataka next month, and has some swanky features that reportedly make it tamper-proof. We just hope it means no more election-rigging blame game between political parties.
One of the people accused of medical negligence in the Gorakhpur hospital tragedy was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court Wednesday. “A single bench of Justice Yashwant Verma granted him bail accepting the counsel’s argument that there was not sufficient evidence against him,” The Hindu reports. In an open letter last week, Dr Kafeel Khan had said he “did everything a doctor, a father, a responsible citizen of India would” when the hospital’s oxygen supply was reportedly cut off, Sanya Dhingra and Deeksha Bhardwaj reported for ThePrint Wednesday.
Kashmir politician Ghulam Nabi Patel, 61, was shot in the Valley Wednesday. The political leader, earlier associated with the Congress and the PDP, was killed and two of his personal security officers injured when “unidentified gunmen opened fire on his vehicle in Rajpora market, 7 km from Pulwama town”, The Indian Express reports.
India’s free press is far from free, according to the World Press Freedom Index report, where India has been ranked 138 out of 180 countries. Compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the “report mentioned sharing of ‘hate speeches’ targeting journalists by ‘troll armies’ of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a reason for this low rank. The report also mentioned ‘physical violence’ against journalists, for example, the murder of Gauri Lankesh, as another key reason,” FirstPost reports.
The lawyer defending the accused in the Kathua rape case has called J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti a “jihadi chief minister” who is “spearheading an Islamo-fascist communal agenda”, The Indian Express reports. Ankur Sharma is the same man who brought us this gem of a statement — “How intelligent can she be? She’s a girl” — when he spoke about Shwetambari Sharma, the woman police officer investigating the Kathua child rape case.
While a forensic lab in Delhi took ‘just one drop of blood’ to crack the Kathua rape case, “over 1,200 DNA samples from sexual assault cases were still pending examination at forensic science laboratories (CFSLs) across India till December 2017”, Hindustan Times reports. Only three of the six labs — in Chandigarh, Hyderabad and Kolkata — have the facility to test DNA samples, and, between them, they can reportedly only handle 600 cases a year.
Also, Gautam Gambhir quit as Delhi Daredevils captain Wednesday. Read his first-hand account, written exclusively for The Times of India. He says it was “my decision to step down, no one pushed me into it”. “I couldn’t handle pressure. I was 28 when I took charge of KKR and now I am 36. I was over-eager here,” he adds. Hindustan Times brings you other instances of captains stepping down over the years.
In ThePrint
Fadnavis has a new plan for Mumbai: The Maharashtra government has “increased the commercial and residential floor space index (FSI), allowing more growth on a given plot area, and unlocked ecologically sensitive land to create 10 lakh affordable houses in a city with skyrocketing real estate prices”, Manasi Phadke reports.
The Election Commission, in an unprecedented move, called a meeting with 11 former chiefs to “help chalk out a strategy to ‘deal with the emerging challenges'”, Pragya Kaushika reports.The 21 May meeting is being viewed as a damage-control exercise after some political parties questioned the credibility and independence of the EC.
Business Class
Ending speculation, Patanjali has denied making a Rs 9,000 crore bid for debt-laden edible oil maker Ruchi Soya Industries, reports The Economic Times.
The lucrative defence market of India is an open secret. Lockheed Martin Corp has decided to offer India latest technologies of radar, tracking system and radio data link system with its F-16 fighter planes, reports Bloomberg.
Bharti Infratel and Indus Towers have decided to merge and in the process become the second largest telecommunications tower company in the world, reports Business Standard.
New’s it’s just kinda cool to know
For everyone who uses Gmail (which means pretty much everyone), you now have cool new features to look forward to. NDTV Gadgets tells us that “Gmail, on Wednesday, got a much-awaited design refresh after five long years”. With improved aesthetic also comes new functionality, as the mailing platform now has “several AI-based features including Smart Reply, email snoozing, and nudging recipients to respond”.
Hank Azaria, the voice of Apu on the famous American animated TV show The Simpsons, has offered to step down after repeated criticism over the years that the character is a racist caricature of Indians. Speaking to talk show host Stephen Colbert, Azaria said “I think the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it,” The Guardian reports.
Chinese tech companies are looking for ‘attractive’ women to appoint as “programmer motivators” to help ease the burden on overworked male employees through conversation and massages, The New York Times reports. Yes, you read it right.
Global warming is confusing mother nature, as the hunter and the prey are slowly becoming un-synchronised when it comes to meal timings, The New Indian Express reports. If critters go hungry, we humans may be to blame.
Point of View
A Jodhpur trial court sentenced self-styled ‘godman’ Asaram to life behind bars for raping a minor girl. The Times Of India writes in its editorial that “the cult leader must also be prosecuted for the killing of witnesses”.
After Tripura, Meghalaya became the second northeast state to completely lose AFSPA. The Hindu, in its editorial, welcomes the move, and adds, “Should it (AFSPA) be on the statute books at all?”.
As election day approaches, the political battle is heating up in Karnataka. Journalist Neerja Chowdhury, in her column in The Times Of India, analyses what’s at stake for the two major parties contesting the polls, the Congress and the BJP. She says the battle looks very close.
In the wake of the Nirav Modi-PNB scam, the government as well as the RBI have come up with some measures to avoid a recurrence, the latest being the Fugitive Economic Offenders (FEO) Ordinance, 2018. Former union minister Milind Deora, in his column in The Economic Times, writes, “The onus is now on GoI (government of India) to ensure that its implementation is fair and safeguards against undue harassment of legitimate businessmen.”
PM Modi will have a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday in Wuhan. Suhasini Haidar, in her column in The Hindu, takes a look at the “record of grand summitry”. She writes, “…Keep in mind Kennedy’s famous words, after the Khrushchev visit to the US: ‘It is far better that we meet at the summit than at the brink. But let us remember that assurances of future talks are not assurances of future success or agreement.'”
