Above the Fold: Top stories of the day
1. Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar said that he had rejected an offer by India's most-wanted criminal Dawood Ibrahim to surrender because it came with the condition that the don shouldn't be put behind bars.
2. Three prosecution witnesses in the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack case involving alleged Hindu extremists, have turned hostile dealing another setback to the National Investigation Agency.
3. The President's office has filed a complaint with the Delhi Police claiming a tweet put out by controversial Indian Premier League Founder Lalit K Modi was derogatory.
The Big Story: Dropping like flies
More than 40 people connected with Madhya Pradesh's pernicious cash-for-jobs Vyapam scam have already allegedly died in suspicious circumstances. Now it has become even more worrisome: an Aaj Tak reporter suddenly took ill and died in Madhya Pradesh, just hours after he had interviewed the parents of Namrata Dabor, a girl who had been found dead under mysterious circumstances near railway tracks after her name had figured in the scam. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has promised a strict investigation into the incident, with initial reactions from doctors saying they don't suspect foul play. Considering the state of the Vyapam inquiry in general, though, people have every right to be concerned that a journalist has been added to the ever-growing list of the dead.
Weekend Reads
1. The families of three crew members on the Coast Guard Dornier aircraft, which disappeared on June 8 and hasn't been found since, are still out there turning to dreams, astrologers and just scanning the coastline for their missing kin, writes Arun Janardhanan in the Indian Express.
2. Swaminathan Aiyar in the Times of India thinks Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to insist on 100,000 Megawatts of solar power by 2022 could end up as an expensive experiment that ends in failure.
3. Segregation in housing, splitting up people of different religions and castes, is not an outcome of poverty but a cause of it, writes Sumit Mishra in Mint on Sunday.
4. Is it possible to put forward a version of history that doesn't conform to the Aryan Invasion Theory without immediately being labeled a Hindu nationalist, asks Ambarish Satwik in Blink.
5. The Modi government is paying very close attention to what the media is saying about it writes Vasudha Venugopal in the Economic Times, such close attention that after International Yoga Day, the Information and Broadcasting ministry put together a 300-page document that calls those channels that didn't cover the Yoga Day events "defaulters."
6. Rahul Bhattacharya in BS Weekend writes of the one day he spent with his wife in the spring when he learnt just how brute-force the process of delivery is, and how much joy emerges from it afterwards.
7. Kaunain Sheriff M in the Indian Express revisits the killings of 35 mostly Muslim men who were killed in Muzaffarnagar after protesting the Emergency's sterilisation drive.
8. The Emergency wasn't that big of a deal, except for the politicians who realised how difficult life could be for ordinary Indians, writes Aakar Patel in Mint Lounge.
9. The Economist covers a "remarkable story" unfolding in India: the government's withholding of a report prepared in conjunction with UNICEF which shows the grim status of malnourishment in India.
10. Siddhartha Vaidyanathan asks a not-so-simple question in the Cricket Monthly: is cricket a team game?
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
1. Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar said that he had rejected an offer by India's most-wanted criminal Dawood Ibrahim to surrender because it came with the condition that the don shouldn't be put behind bars.
2. Three prosecution witnesses in the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack case involving alleged Hindu extremists, have turned hostile dealing another setback to the National Investigation Agency.
3. The President's office has filed a complaint with the Delhi Police claiming a tweet put out by controversial Indian Premier League Founder Lalit K Modi was derogatory.
The Big Story: Dropping like flies
More than 40 people connected with Madhya Pradesh's pernicious cash-for-jobs Vyapam scam have already allegedly died in suspicious circumstances. Now it has become even more worrisome: an Aaj Tak reporter suddenly took ill and died in Madhya Pradesh, just hours after he had interviewed the parents of Namrata Dabor, a girl who had been found dead under mysterious circumstances near railway tracks after her name had figured in the scam. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has promised a strict investigation into the incident, with initial reactions from doctors saying they don't suspect foul play. Considering the state of the Vyapam inquiry in general, though, people have every right to be concerned that a journalist has been added to the ever-growing list of the dead.
Weekend Reads
1. The families of three crew members on the Coast Guard Dornier aircraft, which disappeared on June 8 and hasn't been found since, are still out there turning to dreams, astrologers and just scanning the coastline for their missing kin, writes Arun Janardhanan in the Indian Express.
2. Swaminathan Aiyar in the Times of India thinks Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to insist on 100,000 Megawatts of solar power by 2022 could end up as an expensive experiment that ends in failure.
3. Segregation in housing, splitting up people of different religions and castes, is not an outcome of poverty but a cause of it, writes Sumit Mishra in Mint on Sunday.
4. Is it possible to put forward a version of history that doesn't conform to the Aryan Invasion Theory without immediately being labeled a Hindu nationalist, asks Ambarish Satwik in Blink.
5. The Modi government is paying very close attention to what the media is saying about it writes Vasudha Venugopal in the Economic Times, such close attention that after International Yoga Day, the Information and Broadcasting ministry put together a 300-page document that calls those channels that didn't cover the Yoga Day events "defaulters."
6. Rahul Bhattacharya in BS Weekend writes of the one day he spent with his wife in the spring when he learnt just how brute-force the process of delivery is, and how much joy emerges from it afterwards.
7. Kaunain Sheriff M in the Indian Express revisits the killings of 35 mostly Muslim men who were killed in Muzaffarnagar after protesting the Emergency's sterilisation drive.
8. The Emergency wasn't that big of a deal, except for the politicians who realised how difficult life could be for ordinary Indians, writes Aakar Patel in Mint Lounge.
9. The Economist covers a "remarkable story" unfolding in India: the government's withholding of a report prepared in conjunction with UNICEF which shows the grim status of malnourishment in India.
10. Siddhartha Vaidyanathan asks a not-so-simple question in the Cricket Monthly: is cricket a team game?