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As the Sterlite saga gets murkier, Tamil Nadu chief minister E.K. Palaniswami has ordered the Tuticorin smelter unit’s closure and cut off its electricity supply, reports The Hindu. The chief minister, who broke his silence on the matter after two days, blamed political parties for “instigating the violence”, Hindustan Times adds. Meanwhile, The Indian Express says a subcommittee, recommended two months ago by a ministry of environment and forests panel, to assess the environmental clearance given to Vedanta’s Sterlite Copper plant in 2009, is yet to be constituted.
How did Vedanta reportedly circumvent Tamil Nadu’s controls? Watch here
‘Phir ek baar, Modi sarkar’: The Prime Minister loves a good slogan, so the BJP did its homework a full year in advance to give him one: ‘2019 mein phir ek baar, Modi sarkar (In 2019, Modi government yet again)’, Ruhi Tewari reports for ThePrint. The slogan, along with a three-minute video, will be released Saturday, when the government marks its fourth anniversary. The tagline? ‘Saaf niyat, sahi vikas (clean intentions, right development)’.
Diamonds are a man’s best friend, but Nirav Modi knows how expensive they are. The Enforcement Directorate has discovered that of the fraud LoUs worth Rs 6,939 crore issued by PNB, the disgraced jeweller diverted Rs 4,299 crore to himself and his family. How did he do this? The old fashioned way — by creating dummy companies based in the UAE and Hong Kong, The Indian Express reports in its lead story today.
The JD(S)-Congress shotgun marriage is already showing signs of strain. Karnataka Congress leader and deputy chief minister G. Parameshwara has said the party had not yet decided to support H.D. Kumaraswamy as CM for the full five-year-term, The Times of India reports .
It turns out that Indian Universities don’t like their chairs being named after academics, preferring political leaders, “mostly in keeping with the ideology of the party in power at the Centre”, Kritika Sharma reports for ThePrint.
‘We need to talk about Kashmir’ is the prevailing sentiment among India’s senior government officials, who met home minister Rajnath Singh at a two-day National Security Strategies Conference. They said India should hold a dialogue with Kashmiri separatists, including the Hurriyat, and Pakistan to “ease tensions in the Kashmir Valley and along the border”, The Hindu reports.
The mother of the woman allegedly denied permission to meet Major Gogoi in his hotel room has said the officer — who used a civilian as a human shield in Kashmir last year — had raided their home twice in the company of the same man, Sameer Ahmed, found in the hotel with the woman, The Indian Express reports. As for the ‘lakshman rekha’ Indian Army officers simply cannot cross when meeting women, Deeksha Bhardwaj of The Print breaks it down.
Did Shashi Tharoor abet his wife’s suicide? The did-he/didn’t-he question that most bothers Tharoor’s rivals, challengers and adversaries may now be answered sooner than later, as a Delhi court has transferred the case to a designated fast-track court. Delhi Police had recently filed a chargesheet against Tharoor for allegedly abetting Sunanda Pushkar’s suicide, which the MP had declared “preposterous” and said he intended to “vigorously contest”, The Hindu reports.
Business Class
With temperature hovering around 44°C, summer has properly arrived. On 23 May, “India recorded a cumulative power demand of 170,121 Mw, which is around 8 per cent higher consumption than in the same month last year”, reports Business Standard.
The telecom department cleared the sale of Idea Cellular’s standalone mobile towers for Rs 4,000 crore to the Indian arm of American Tower Corporation — thus paving the way for the merger of Idea and Vodafone India, reports The Economic Times.
News it’s just kinda cool to know
Ronaldinho really knows how to play the field. The Brazilian football legend is set to marry two women at the same time in August — his fiancés Priscilla Coelho and Beatriz Souza — The Times of India tells us . Apparently, the ménage a trois has been living “harmoniously” since December at Ronaldinho’s £5 million Rio de Janeiro mansion. His sister, the ‘party-pooper’, however says she doesn’t support his polygamy and won’t attend the wedding.
Is cockroach milk the next superfood? Believe it or not, recent research has found nutrient-rich milk crystals inside cockroach milk (what’s that, ugh), specifically that of the ‘Pacific beetle’, which apparently “contains four times as much protein as cow’s milk”, India Times lets us know. (Warning: Don’t open the link if you don’t really want to).
The Gujarat government is appealing to the Gods for good rains. As a heatwave blows over the northern half of the country, the Vijay Rupani-led BJP government has decided to hold 41 ‘parjanya yagnas’ on 31 May in 33 districts and eight major cities to “appease Lord Indra the Rain God and Lord Varun the Water God”, The Times of India reports.
Point of View
Mayawati’s presence at the recent opposition show of strength in Karnataka has special significance, says The Indian Express in its editorial. “Mayawati has rarely shared the spotlight with other leaders, or forged a pre-poll alliance. The images of her alongside other leaders, especially Sonia Gandhi, in Bengaluru could be a sign of a rethink of the BSP’s patented isolationism.”
Business Standard says about the trigger for recent protests in Tuticorin, “The failure to… imaginatively harmonise corporate action with local concerns lies at the heart of India’s quest for rapid development.”
A Bloomberg report on how funds have dried up for the Congress moves Aakar Patel to tell us in his Business Standard column that the lack of moolah isn’t the only problem that bedevils the grand old party; there’s also its “low-energy leadership going up against the two most motivated and hungry leaders in politics, perhaps anywhere in the democratic world”.
The European General Data Protection Regulation, aimed at protecting user data, comes into effect today. Lawyer Apar Gupta, in his column in The Hindu, writes that India can take the leaves out of Europe’s book but will need to fine-tune the provisions to suit its domestic and local needs.
Media Watch
UN special rapporteurs have urged Indian authorities to protect Rana Ayyub, who was recently doxxed and received death threats amid an online hate campaign apparently triggered by a fake tweet that quoted Ayyub as supporting child rapists and saying Muslims weren’t safe in India.
Rajdeep Sardesai, in his column in Hindustan Times, believes the BJP’s decision to stake claim in Karnataka is a statement on how “the moral high ground has slipped under the quicksand of individual ambitions and the arrogance of electoral invincibility”.
Dainik Bhaskar has obtained an ex parte order from the Delhi High Court against Cobrapost in an attempt to restrict the latter from releasing a documentary that incriminates the paper and two dozen media houses for accepting money from an undercover reporter seeking coverage “designed to polarise voters in favour of Hindutva”, The Wire reports.
Prime time
Sterlite remained a top news story on TV channels. On CNN News 18, PMK (Pattali Makkal Katchi) leader Vinoba Bhoopathy described the killings in the Sterlite protests as “state-sponsored terrorism”, while news anchor Sanket Upadhyaya said the state police was quickly devolving into “a monstrous and criminal force”. Unsurprisingly, Republic TV passed the Sterlite buck to the Congress, with Arnab Goswami accusing the party of giving no less than eight clearances to Sterlite
Are NGOs misusing money? The four-year-old debate, first triggered after the Modi government came to power, was reopened by Times Now anchor Rahul Shivshankar, who questioned the accountability of several organisations. The ministry of home affairs, he said, had issued notices to 3,292 NGOs/institutes including Delhi University, JNU, IGNOU, IIT-Madras and others, asking them to submit their annual returns from 2011-12 to 2016-17 within the next 15 days or face cancellation of licence under FCRA, 2010.
India Today anchor Preeti Choudhary felt it was in the fitness of things to discuss Rajyavardhan Rathore’s ‘Fitness Challenge’, much in vogue these days, discussing how Virat Kohli had challenged Narendra Modi and the latter had accepted. “Don’t you think that this is a good initiative and why is politics done over it?” Choudhary asked. RJD politician Tejashwi Yadav was clearly unimpressed. What about the challenge against unemployment and the uplift of Dalits, he wanted to know.
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