Front Page
The Supreme Court has spoken: The news of the apex court rejecting petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge B.H. Loya eclipsed all other events Thursday. Every headline today was a variation of the Supreme Court’s statement that it had found no evidence of foul play in judge Loya’s death, and that the pleas were an attempt to malign the credibility of the judiciary (when Loya reportedly suffered a cardiac arrest, he was accompanied by four judges). Read The Indian Express or The Hindu coverage to get an idea, or you can also go over excerpts from the judgment.
Late CBI judge B.H. Loya’s family members said the Supreme Court’s decision had extinguished their hopes of closure and “everything seemed managed”, Manasi Phadke reports for ThePrint.
The Supreme Court has asked the Bar Council of India to submit a report within three days “on the conduct of lawyers in Jammu & Kashmir who allegedly obstructed the filing of the chargesheet in the Kathua rape and murder case”, The Hindu reports front page.
Meanwhile, talks of Congress efforts to seek the impeachment of the CJI are doing the rounds again. Hindustan Times reports that the Opposition has sought a meeting with Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu Friday, armed with the signatures of 67 Rajya Sabha members to move the motion in Parliament. They needed 50.
The Army can’t buy expensive ammunition it desperately needs “because sufficient funds weren’t allocated in the defence budget… Currently, their stocks would not be sufficient for even 10 days of war”, The Indian Express reports. “Taken along with other measures to save funds, this will still leave the Army with an estimated shortfall of 15-25 per cent in critical ammunition.”
Are India and China patching up? It seems that in the wake of the Doklam standoff, China has reached out to India with an offer to resume confidence-building military exchanges, “signaling an important shift ahead of defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s visit to Beijing next week”, The Economic Times reports. “Sitharaman… is expected to take this conversation further with China’s new defence minister Wei Fenghe.”
The Congress wants to bet on a winning horse, as former Madhya Pradesh CM “Digvijaya Singh has informed Congress president Rahul Gandhi about his preference for Kamal Nath over Jyotiraditya Scindia” as the chief ministerial candidate for the state, which goes to the polls at the end of the year. Scindia led the party’s campaign in 2013, but the Congress lost, D.K. Singh and Kumar Anshuman report for ThePrint.
The BJP is planning to rope in Swami Aseemanand, recently acquitted in the Mecca Masjid blast, in West Bengal “to strengthen its base, its state unit chief said Thursday”, The Hindu reports. Aseemanand’s younger brother Sushanta Sarkar is currently the secretary of the BJP’s Hooghly unit.
To Russia, with love: Days after national security adviser Ajit Doval visited Moscow, the BJP general secretary and the Prime Minister’s key foreign policy aide Ram Madhav is set to meet senior Russian officials this week as India steps up engagement with the Vladimir Putin-led country. This comes at a time when “Russia is facing increasing pressure from Western powers on several counts”, The Economic Times reports.
In case the ATM doesn’t have cash, SBI has urged its customers to “withdraw money via the point-of-sale (PoS) terminals of merchant establishments”, The Hindu reports. They said they would not charge any fees for the service. Meanwhile, the cash crunch in the country seems to have eased, as 86 per cent of ATMs came online and cash was transported to deficit areas.
Water Wars 2.0: Haryana isn’t sharing Yamuna waters with Delhi in keeping with their arrangement, and so the Supreme Court had to step in and tell the state to “immediately release water to the national capital”. For context, The Times of India reports that the SC “passed the order on a plea of the Delhi Jal Board, which accused Haryana of disobeying the court’s 1996 order directing the state to release 450 cusecs of Yamuna water daily to Delhi for drinking”.
Business Class
German pharmaceutical and chemicals group Merck has announced its decision to sell its consumer health business to American giant Procter & Gamble, saying it would use the proceeds mostly to pay off debt, reports The Economic Times.
The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) directed resolution professional Satish Kumar Gupta and the committee of creditors to reconsider the bids of Numetal and ArcelorMittal for Essar Steel, one of the 12 accounts shortlisted by the RBI for immediate bankruptcy resolution in June last year, reports Mint.
News it’s just kinda cool to know
Indians spend 90 per cent of their web time on mobile phones, The Times of India reports. The global average of mobile-only users hovered at 30% in 2017. India also had 400 per cent more unique mobile users than desktop users in India, the highest of all countries.
‘Now hiring: 60-year-old interns for startup,’ a Times of India headline reads. Truebil, a virtual marketplace for pre-owned cars, is hiring retired senior citizens as interns to work on short-term stints at the firm. The objective is to re-engage retired citizens of the community, and to find mentors for the younger employees of the organisation.
In 2017, India’s GDP crossed the $2.5 trillion mark for the first time. This makes India the sixth largest economy, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook for April 2018. To find out what this means in real terms, read the Hindustan Times coverage.
Point of View
The Supreme Court ruled there was no need for another investigation in judge B.H. Loya’s death. The Indian Express, in its editorial, writes that the focus should now shift to the Sohrabuddin case, which Loya was hearing at the time of his death.
The Union government has set up the Defence Planning Committee to undertake comprehensive planning for the defence forces. In its editorial, The Times Of India welcomes the move, saying, “At present, defence planning in India is very disjointed, with lopsided emphasis on acquisitions.”
Veteran journalist Karan Thapar criticised the Prime Minister for what he called his lack of moral leadership in the wake of the Kathua and Unnao incidents. He writes in his column in The Indian Express, “It’s this moral dimension of leadership — often the most critical of all — that Modi either doesn’t believe in or cannot rise up to.”
Asian countries seem to be in a hurry to strengthen bilateral relationships among themselves. Indrani Bagchi, in her column in The Times Of India, writes, “…Everybody’s playing everybody else in a classic balance of power game…may be a good thing.”
Congress Lok Sabha member and former HRD minister Shashi Tharoor, in his column in The Hindu, discusses the sorry state of primary education in India. He writes, “The Centre must review the lack of implementation of the Right to Education Act across the country.”