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.

The Morning Wrap: Why Stalking Persists; India's Sex Toy Buyers

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
Hindustan Times via 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.

Varnika Kundu's stalking in Chandigarh has showed India that the battle for progressive value will have to be fought long and hard, especially in a nation where politicians routinely try to normalise grievous crimes as par for the course.

While India is the sixth most sexually-active country in the world, the sale of sex toys isn't that high. But a survey shows that women in Punjab buy the most number of these products in the country. They still can't beat the mean though.

The Supreme Court of India's next Chief Justice Dipak Mishra is a man with a problematic track record. Apart from rulings to make the playing of the national anthem mandatory before the screening of films, Justice Mishra has presided over several cases that should make us sit up.

For the last seven weeks China and India have been exchanging explosive words over their presence on the Doklam plateau near Sikkim, but the possibility of real military conflicts wasn't a serious threat. However, with China sending in more troops into the region, the situation looks more tense.

The Centre defended to the Supreme Court a provision in the Indian Penal Code that does not penalise a man for forcibly having sex with his wife aged between 15 and 17, saying the exception in rape law was meant to protect the institution of marriage.

Ironically, the 75th anniversary of the Quit India Movement, which brought the entire nation together, was turned in Parliament into an occasion that exposed deep fractures in the polity.

In the unfolding anarchy between political rivals in Kerala, the Left and the BJP/RSS turn out to be two sides of the same coin. A report in The Indian Express lays out the facts on the ground and takes a look at the upheavals over the year.

In the case of Varnika Kundu, who was stalked by two men in Chandigarh, the name of Vikas Barala, son of the BJP chief of Haryana, has come up with regularity. Less mentioned is the other accused, Ashish Kumar, Barala's friend, who was equally culpable of harassing Kundu in the middle of the night.

An English (Hons) graduate in Bengal, with a BEd degree, was allegedly driven to suicide, after he was offered a floor cleaner's job because of his inability to pay staggering bribes, running into several lakh rupees, to get a primer school teacher's job.

The Gujarat Rajya Sabha elections, by all accounts, was a hard fight between the Congress and the BJP. But it was the Election Commission that emerged victorious and covered itself in glory, writes SY Qureshi, former Chief Election Commissioner, in The Indian Express.

In the Hindustan Times Persis Taraporevala explains what India's municipalities can learn from the funding pattern of Smart Cities, an idea that is fast catching up in the country.

Scientists should participate in a public debate on the nature of science and its practice in India, Sundar Sarukkai argues in The Hindu.

Also on HuffPost

Praveen Minj

Male Child Abuse Survivors

Close
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.