RESEARCH

If the only means you can think of expressing your disagreement with some cartoons — however unsavoury — is murder, you need to be treated on your terms. Andcould we stop that facile ‘all are equal’ apology? Islamist fundamentalism is the greatest force of Evil facing humanity. I ndia joined the world yesterday in being stunned at the brutal murder of about a dozen journalists employed with Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly published from Paris. ‘We will kill you to express our disagreement with you’ is the clear message of Islamist extremists. They are an international mafia that studies a target diligently and finally eliminates it at will: from 9/11 to 7/11 to 26/11 and more. Charlie… is a small media house, most of whose employees work out of their homes and meet only once a week: Wednesday. The terrorists did this homework and finished their task with precision, without getting caught by the supposedly superior police of a First World country, even as a shock...

The establishment of NITI Aayog is a clear message that the government is committed to reforms, decentralization and a cooperative federalism that advocates involving states in the Centre’s decision making. I n what can be seen as the greatest policy shift by the new dispensation, the NDA government has begun the year 2015 with scrapping of the Soviet-modelled Planning Commission with NITI Aayog. While “niti” sounds like the Sanskrit-origin word implying “policy” and “ethics”, it’s actually an acronym for National Institution for Transforming India.   Swarajya was the first media outlet to forecast the change rather than speculate what it would be like: “…the Planning Commission will soon morph into a body that facilitates coordination between the Centre and the states.It will certainly not be a planning organ by another name, and it will not be a typical think-tank as is being speculated in the media,” read our 23 October article on the issue. And that is ...