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Before the dust on the battlefield of Uttar Pradesh politics had started to settle, Indian business was in for a big shake-up, as news of Cyrus Mistry, Chairman of Tata Sons, being sacked by its board, broke last evening. Until a new name is announced to replace the 48-year-old in the next four months, Ratan Tata will be acting as interim chairman. While the company didn't disclose the reason behind the ouster and its decision shocked the world at large, industry insiders and experts claimed to have seen this coming for a while. Mistry is not taking any of this lying down either. He plans to move the Bombay High Court to challenge the board's decision.
Earlier in the day, the Yadav family kept up its public drama alive. Akhilesh Yadav, the chief minister of UP, broke down after being reprimanded by his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who maintained a staunch allegiance to his friend, Amar Singh. Akhilesh's bold self-assertion, an unusual step in the world of Indian politics where family values rule supreme, is not without self-interest, Sandip Roy pointed out. In fact, it smacks of the same arrogance and entitlement that is much deplored by critics of dynastic politics.
Trouble has come back to haunt another scion of a political family, Varun Gandhi, with photographs of him, allegedly involved in a sex scandal, surfacing on the Internet. Ironically, as G. Pramod Kumar wrote, an identical scenario had played out nearly four decades ago, when Varun's mother, Maneka Gandhi, had outed similar photographs of then Deputy Prime Minister Jagjivan Ram's son in Surya, a magazine she had published. Those leaked photographs destroyed the prime ministerial aspirations of Jagjivan Ram, who had defected from Indira Gandhi's Congress to the Janata Party.
At least 44 people were killed in a terror attack on a police training academy in Quetta in southwest Pakistan. The militants are believed to belong to the Al-Alimi faction of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group, which is affiliated to the Pakistani Taliban. More than a hundred have been injured in what has been described as a nightlong raid by at least three militants wearing suicide jackets.
Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha went into a state of high alert after a major encounter between security forces and extremists on the Andhra-Odisha border yesterday. While the police recovered rifles and AK-47s from the miscreants, they suspect some of top Maoist leaders to have fled the scene. At least 24 members of Naxalite groups were killed by the Special Forces, including 11 women and 13 men.
Aircraft manufacturer Embraer has agreed to pay $205 million to American and Brazilian authorities as settlement for corruption charges it faces in several countries, including India. In India, it had allegedly paid an agent $5.76 million to seal a deal for the sale of three aircraft for the Indian Air Force's Airborne Early Warning and Control System.
Municipal doctors in Calcutta have been allegedly "verbally instructed" to under-report instances of dengue, which has assumed a serious crisis since July, and to pass off cases in the city as infections contracted elsewhere. While a doctor speaking to The Telegraph said the disease is beyond their control, Mayor Sovan Chatterjee denied allegations of medical professionals being forced to cover-up cases of dengue. As of 2 October, nearly 7,000 such cases have been reported and doctors predict the number could soon exceed 8,000 in the Calcutta municipal belt alone.
Women will be allowed entry into the sanctum sanctorum of the Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai, though there will be a separate path designated for them. The process may take a couple of weeks to come into effect due to the logistics involved, but the decision comes as a much-awaited victory after protracted protests against the age-old sexist tradition of barring women from the inner sanctum.
Police burnt effigies of social activists Nandini Sundar, Bela Bhatia and Himanshu Kumar as well as of political leaders Soni Sori and Manish Kunjam in Bastar, days after the Central Bureau of Investigation held them responsible for burning down 160 houses in Tadmetla village in 2011. Auxiliary constables in uniform took to the streets of Jagdalpur, Dantewada, Bijapur and other places, shouting slogans against these personalities, calling them Naxal sympathisers.
In The Indian Express, policy expert Sanjaya Baru writes on a matter he has closely witnessed for many years, thanks to his proximity to the Congress party: family politics, especially of the dynastic variety. Pegged to the ongoing fracas in the house of the Yadavs in UP, he takes on the subject, in his colourful style, claiming that the voter has a right to know how a political party they have elected to power is going to manage leadership transition. "It's time an institute of management education started a course on managing family-based political parties," he says. "The market for this line of education has been created by the growing recognition of family-run companies that shareholders are demanding greater clarity on issues ranging from succession to the management of wealth and the distribution of profits."
An editorial in the Hindustan Times staunchly opposes the position taken by Asaduddin Owaisi on triple talaq and polygamy. Uncharacteristically, for a politician who is seen to have progressive views, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president has accused Narendra Modi of interfering in Muslim personal laws with his supporting for a uniform civil code and for deeming some of these laws as being anti-women and unconstitutional.
In an op-ed in The Hindu, Arvind Chandrachud debunks a subtle misconception about the discriminations Indians faced under the British law against sedition. While the colonial government did take punish such acts by Indians severely, it did not spare their British counterparts when it came to non-political speech, especially pertaining to art and literature. The offender could be in British India or in England, Indian or British by citizenship, but they weren't be spared any penalties.
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