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The Morning Wrap: India's Tryst With Death Penalty; Aadhaar's Murky Secrets

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
Buddhika Weerasinghe / Reuters

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.

India voted with the US, Saudi Arabia, China and a handful of nations to counter a resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council to abolish death penalty — which is enforced by six countries for consensual same-sex relations, adultery, blasphemy and apostasy.

Sanjay Jha, national spokesperson of the Congress, explains why Yashwant Sinha's war of words with the ruling government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi isn't only about settling personal scores but reveals a vital failing of the economy.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday called "love jihad" a dangerous thing and told the Kerala government that it should act against it. The chief minister was referring to the case of a 24-year-old Hindu girl who converted to marry a Muslim man. The Kerala HC had annulled their marriage.

PM Modi defended his government's performance by saying that the slowdown in growth will be reversed by a reforms programme in the coming months. "We will maintain financial stability and initiate all steps to step up investment and the growth rate," he said.

A report in The Indian Express points out that executives who have worked, or are working, with the Unique Identification Authority of India, the parent agency for Aadhaar, are launching companies or funding start-ups that offer Aadhaar-based services and products for a fee.

Despite abortions being legal for the last 46 years, almost 60% of procedures in India are unsafe, a ratio that is much closer to the numbers in countries where abortion is illegal. Lack of access to hospitals and the stigma associated with it are reasons behind such shocking figures.

The decades-long conflict in Kashmir has taken away attention from one of the most pressing problems in the valley: addiction to drugs among the youth. Neelam Pandey of the Hindustan Times reports on it from Srinagar.

Actor, director and producer Prakash Raj speaks to The Hindu about the controversy he has landed in by criticising the government of PM Modi, especially the latter's silence since the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh.

In bizarre news of the day, the Hindustan Times reports Rajo Devi, a resident of Rajasthan's Hanumangarh district, identified a dead man as her brother and cremated him. Turned out her elder brother Kaluram was still alive.

Gujarat in perhaps the only state in India where there are frequent defections between members of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, but the latter mostly ends up gaining from it. Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Vernier analyse the reasons in The Indian Express.

Mamata Banerjee's controversial entanglements during Durga Puja this year gave her a political advantage over the BJP, her main opponent in Bengal now, argues Avijit Ghosal in the Hindustan Times.

In The Indian Express, Shailaja Bajpai writes about her experience of watching food shows on Indian television, which may be feast for the eyes but involve some amount of censorship. Read more.

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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.