The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. Five rioters have been killed in firing by the armed forces, as the Jat quota agitation sweeps Haryana.
2. Jat protesters have blocked the Munak canal, a major source of water for Delhi, leading to an impending water crisis in the capital city.
3. Aam Aadmi Party leader and adivasi rights activist Soni Sori has been attacked in Chhattisgarh. This comes at a time when lawyers and journalists are being forced to flee the region or the state.
4. The Delhi Police have asked Zee News for its footage of the JNU event on February 9, when “anti-national” slogans were allegedly raised on the campus.
5. Bharatiya Janata Party targets the Aligarh Muslim University for allegedly serving beef in its canteen.
Weekend reads
1. The political headquarters of the Indian State have moved from New Delhi to Nagpur, says an editorial in the Telegraph.
2. The more JNU-type slogans we hear, the more Hindu rage we will see, says Tavleen Singh in the Indian Express.
3. If the threat of sedition hangs heavily on our campuses, we’ll have cyber zombies and ideology slaves emerging from them rather than innovators and radical thinkers, argues Josy Joseph in the Hindu.
5. In the Telegraph, Ruchir Joshi explains that the JNU row is larger than the Bharatiya Janata Party – it draws upon the twisted jingoism of a large number of Indians.
6. The BJP has big plans for Sanskrit – including changing its Roman spelling to “Samskrit”.
7. Zoe Carpenter in the Nation asks why poor Americans are dying so much earlier than the rich ones.
8. In Delhi’s seedy underbelly, an Uzbeki dancer goes missing. Veena Venugopal, in the Business Line, writes about how the search for her pries open the world of human trafficking of ‘Russian girls’ right in the centre of Delhi.
9. Umberto Eco obituary: Ian Thomas in the Guardian writes about the Italian writer and philosopher known for his medieval whodunnit The Name of the Rose.
10. Is there any meaning in the mountains of data that Amazon collects, asks Paul Ford in the New Republic.