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The Morning Wrap: Earthquake Kills 262 In Ecuador; Maharashtra CM Loses 18 Kilos In Three Months

The Morning Wrap: Earthquake Kills 262 In Ecuador; Maharashtra CM Loses 18 Kilos In Three Months
India's Maharashtra state new Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis waves towards crowd after his swearing-in ceremony in Mumbai on October 31, 2014. India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) snatched election victory on October 19 in two key Indian states, tightening its grip on power after storming to government nationally five months ago. AFP PHOTO/ PUNIT PARANJPE (Photo credit should read PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images)
PUNIT PARANJPE via Getty Images
India's Maharashtra state new Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis waves towards crowd after his swearing-in ceremony in Mumbai on October 31, 2014. India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) snatched election victory on October 19 in two key Indian states, tightening its grip on power after storming to government nationally five months ago. AFP PHOTO/ PUNIT PARANJPE (Photo credit should read PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images)

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

National Award-winning actor Nana Patekar explained why he feels so deeply about the drought that has literally brought the Marathwada region in Maharashtra to a standstill. As of 1 March this year, 57 farmers have already committed suicide in Maharashtra in 2016 due to agrarian reasons.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar recently said that the only way to beat the BJP in the next Lok Sabha election was for the all other parties to come together. Kumar said that he wasn't "against any individual," but he went on to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not fulfilling the promises he made in the national election in 2014.

Speaking at a popular news chat show, actor Shah Rukh Khan said that his remarks about intolerance were misinterpreted last year, and that he is deeply troubled when his loyalties to the country are questioned over and over again.

With India often described as 'the bright spot in the global economy', Reserve Bank Governor (RBI) Raghuram Rajan termed this phenomenon as a case of "the one-eyed man" being king in the land of the blind.

Main News

Mobile phone internet services were suspended in Ahmedabad, Mehsana, Surat, Rajkot and a curfew was imposed in Mehsana after a call to court arrest given by Patidar leaders turned violent. The clashes happened just a day before a high-level committee of seven state ministers was to meet the Patidar leaders mediating peace talks between the agitating community and the Gujarat state government.

A 7.8 magnitude earthquake, the strongest to hit Ecuador since 1979 claimed 262 lives. The quake was centered on Ecuador’s sparsely populated fishing ports and tourist beaches, 170 kilometers northwest of Quito, the nation's capital.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's decision to not name Captain Amarinder Singh its CM candidate in Punjab, gave Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) fresh ammunition to criticise the Punjab Congress president. The hashtag #RahulCheatedCaptain was trending on Twitter all of Sunday evening with speculations rife as to why Gandhi sidestepped the chance of making a formal announcement about Singh.

Taking inspiration from the life of Dr BR Ambedkar, the Dalits of Pakistan have launched a movement called Dalit Insaaf Tehreek to fight against the discrimination against them not only by Muslims, but also by the upper caste Hindus who constitute only a fraction the Islamic nation's population.

Off The Front Page

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has grabbed headlines for his drastic weight loss — even with a lot on his plate. The CM looked dapper and conspicuously slimmer as he has lost 18 kilos in just about three months. Earlier, he weighed about 122 kilos, and now he has reduced to 108 kilos.

As the scalding heat wave sweeps across central and south India, one Telangana woman has found a way to benefit from it — by boiling and frying eggs on a stone porch.

For the first time, an Indian woman gymnast has qualified for the Olympics, as 22-year-old Dipa Karmakar from Tripura secured a place in this year's Rio Olympic Games by garnering a total score of 52.698 points. Karmakar already created history when she became the first Indian woman gymnast to win a bronze medal in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014. She then became the first Indian woman gymnast to feature in the finals of the World Gymnastics Championships last November.

Opinion

India’s first rankings of higher education institutions need improvement, says Pushkar in his column in The Indian Express. "For now, however, the participation of higher education institutions in the initiative is still voluntary and needs to improve... The stated intent of the government was to prepare India-centric ranking parameters that were sensitive to metrics such as access to higher education and social inclusion. Interestingly, if one goes through the details of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), the weightage given to India-specific parameters is not pronounced," he writes.

Initially, the incident of the flamboyant business tycoon Vijay Mallya decamping with debts of ₹9,000 crore owed to India’s banks, had been analysed in the media as an instance of crony capitalism, says Pulapre Balakrishnan in The Hindu. "But a maverick economist had quipped that it may be better described as “crony socialism”. Perhaps he had had in mind that it is the public sector banks that had lent so fecklessly to Mallya, and these had for decades, been showcased as a symbol of Indian socialism," he writes.

Regarding Kashmir and the Northeast, mainstream Indian political opinion underplays the violence inflicted on people who are formally citizens of this republic, writes Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph. "The Indian citizen outside the valley has three options. He can support self-determination in Kashmir knowing that it might mean either a sectarian Muslim statelet or more territory for a larger sectarian state, Pakistan. He can endorse the military occupation because, in the larger scheme of things, Kashmiri Muslim suffering is the price that must be paid for the greater good of a pluralist India. Or he can press for the abolition of AFSPA, the demilitarisation of Kashmir and the Northeast and the institution of a process by which atrocities by the security forces, especially in the period between 1989 and 1996 are investigated and the guilty punished," he says.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.