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The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
ONE sees a few good reasons to miss Dilip Kumar every Aug 5, starting this week. It was on this day that his most popular movie Mughal-i-Azam was released in 1960 depicting a halcyonic blend of Hindu and Muslim cultures during Emperor Akbar’s rule (1556-1605). It’s an essential beauty of Akbar’s rule that regressively tutored Hindus and Muslims bear equal malice for his fabled secular worldview. The film’s story was largely mythological like Camelot but Mughal-i-Azam was crucially told from a Nehruvian lens that romanced the coming together of popular lore with the secular sensibilities of a newly independent multicultural democracy.
The Perception of Being Discriminated Against is Overpowering Reforming criminal justice to stop targeting ‘minorities’ in India
Minority rights in India’s criminal justice system are in dire straits as revealed graphically in the institutional murder of Father Stan Swamy, the Adivasi rights activist. The authorities’ indifference to end such horrific human rights violations is also brought out in several recent reports.
Persisting violence and crimes against minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and ‘national or ethnic minorities’ (UN terminology) elsewhere in India including the northeast, where I was posted for several years, pose a challenge to India’s criminal justice system. The matter came up for serious consideration at the 8th session of the UN Forum on Minority Rights in the Criminal Justice System in Geneva in November 2015. The report of UN special rapporteur Rita Izsak on the subject was presented to the 70th Session of the General Assembly.
1993 Vohra Committee report ignored
Recent news reports reveal that the Indian banks wrote off loans worth Rs 1.53 lakh crore in 2020-2021 to show low non-profit assets in their books. This is the second highest amount being written off in the past decade.
The highest write off was in 2018-2019 at Rs 2.54 lakh crore. The striking part is that the biggest defaulters are corporate houses whose loans are written off with the stroke of a pen. The highest write-offs were in the quarter ending December 2020; 55.65% of total non-performing assets (NPA) written off in the year.
When someone posted the above news report on Facebook, a retired diplomat responded by saying: “Ignorant article. A write off cleans up a balance sheet by accepting that certain loans will not be paid back. So it reduces the asset base, never an easy decision but a brave one, it s being realistic. It does not make a balance sheet look good as it wipes out reserves. But it does not let off the defaulters. Their l
India has for the first time formed a policy to compile, archive, declassify, and publish military operations and war histories.Earlier there was no such provision. Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday approved the policy on .