The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. A Jawaharlal Nehru University internal committee has recommended the rustication of sedition-accused students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and three others.
2. The Enforcement Directorate on Monday arrested Nationalist Congress Party leader Chaggan Bhujbal in an alleged money laundering case.
3. A sting operation allegedly conducted in 2014 has now been released by two journalists who claim they are exposing 11 leaders of the Trinamool Congress taking bribes, ahead of polls in the state.
The Big Story: Home affairs
Following the Jadavpur University incident last month, where protestors supporting students at Jawaharlal Nehru University also allegedly shouted anti-national slogans, the Kolkata Police is about to carry out a rather broad profiling operation. A report in the Indian Express says that the police has asked all colleges in the city to give details of students from Jammu and Kashmir so that they can be forwarded on to the Home Ministry.
The report says that the police note was sent out to colleges in the last week of February, and the Joint Commissioner of Police (Intelligence) confirmed that information about the note was authentic. The attempt is to monitor the activity of Kashmiri students, based on the presumption that they are most likely to be spreading anti-national sentiments.
This is both highly problematic and also depressingly routine. Kashmiris have had to live in a highly constricted environment in their own state, because of the violent separatists who have given the state a reason to keep the area militarised. This leads to disenchantment among young Kashmiris, who notice the constant intervention of the state into their lives, often making them even more unhappy with India.
This move from the Home Ministry is only really surprising because of the unprecedented experiment that the BJP attempted over a year ago when it decided to tie up with the People's Democratic Party, a Kashmiri party that is softer towards separatists. Rumours suggested that the Delhi Police has not yet arrested Kashmiri students who raised slogans in JNU because it did not want to anger the PDP, so that the alliance is maintained.
How the Kashmiri party, which has yet to stake a claim to forming the government after the chief minister died last year, responds to this latest attempt at exporting the surveillance state, remains to be seen.
The Big Scroll
Look back at the era of deception that the BJP-PDP coalition ended with its open alliance. No one knows when the Jammu and Kashmir government will be formed – but citizens no longer care.
Politicking & Policying
1. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley clarified that the government had no change in its reservations policy, after the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh called for fewer quotas.
2. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will meet the Pakistani Prime Minister's adviser on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz at a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meet in Nepal.
3. The National Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the Tamil Nadu government after shocking visuals showed a Dalit man hacked to death in broad daylight after he married a woman from a dominant caste.
4. The Home Ministry has set up a committee to look into missing files in the Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter.
5. A Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Legislative Assembly in Dehradun has been booked for attacking a police horse during a protest.
Punditry
1. A bit surprisingly from a Congress leader, Sachin Pilot writes in the Indian Express that the Aadhar Bill could shrink our right to privacy.
2. This op-ed in the Hindu, written by Ashok Parthasarathi, actually argues that the 1991 liberalisation reforms killed Indian manufacturing.
3. Ajai Shukla in the Business Standard says that Armyism, the unique secularism of the military forces, is being undermined.
Don't Miss
Sucharita Kanjilal writes about the colonial domination of India, in its culinary form.
Few colonial food concepts are as enduring as the British idea of curry. The British, and indeed plenty of others around the world, use the term curry not as a descriptor for a kind of dish – say a Kerala chicken curry – but as a collective term that requires no article. A term that encompasses the cuisine of an entire nation. “I’m going out for curry” is Birminghamspeak for I’m going out to eat Indian food. But is curry Indian food or is it really just British food? And if it is British, what’s the problem with that?
