‍‍‍How Badminton Star Sindhu Makes Telugu States United With Her Medal Achievement?

At a time when the Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana bicker about their share of river waters, the phenomenon called P.V. Sindhu makes all of them and their leaders forget these issues a while with her athletic exploits and Olympic medals.

Sindhu is a major unifying factor and is equally celebrated by both the Telugu states every time she wins.

When she won the badminton silver medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Telangana government rewarded her with a sum of Rs 5 crore, while Andhra Pradesh gave her Rs 3 crore and a plum state government job.

Former Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu offered her the job of a Deputy Collector, which is the top job through the state public service commission's recruitment process.

In fact, a Deputy Collector's job leads one to become a conferred Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer later on in their career.

As an employee of the Andhra Pradesh government, Sindhu says she is always encouraged and helped with working leave when needed.

Will Sindhu also go on to become a senior official in the state government after completing her badminton conquests, taking a leaf out of former fast bowler and inaugural 2007 T20 world cup winning Indian team member Joginder Sharma? Will have to wait and watch for some more years.

Sharma bowled the last over of the T20 world cup to trounce Pakistan and went on to become a senior officer in the Haryana state police department.

After winning her historic second medal at the Tokyo games, becoming first Indian woman to do so, Andhra Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy hailed her as the lone Indian woman to do it.

"All good wishes and congratulations to our Telugu girl Sindhu for winning Bronze for India at Tokyo Olympics 2020," said Reddy.

He did not stop with the wishes but proceeded to reward the state government employee and Olympian with a cash award of Rs 30 lakh.

The Andhra government handed over the cheque to the badminton superstar on Friday after she met Reddy along with her family.

Minister Avanti Srinivas handed over the cheque to Sindhu in the presence of special chief secretary Rajat Bhargava and I & PR Commissioner Vijay Kumar Reddy.

Even before leaving for Tokyo, Reddy met Sindhu and handed over a cash incentive of Rs 5 lakh, along with a copy of the government order allocating 2 acre of land to Sindhu to set up a badminton academy in the port city Visakhapatnam, which will soon become the executive capital of the southern state.

On being asked when she would set up the academy, the much loved shuttler said she would do it soon.
"I am so grateful for your continuous support Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, thank you sir," said Sindhu.

She said the Chief Minister is constantly supporting her and even assured that they are always behind her, including offering whatever she needs to make sure she keeps winning.

"I am very happy. He (Reddy) congratulated me. The Chief Minister blessed and told me to definitely bring a medal and I brought a medal. The whole state has been congratulating me. Thanks to all of them," she said.

In fact, Reddy himself urged her to start the academy soon to nurture more youngsters like her.
The ace shuttler also praised the Andhra Pradesh government for introducing schemes to encourage sports-persons.

Appreciating the state government for reserving 2 per cent jobs for sports-persons in government posts, Sindhu said: "It is appreciable to know that the state government is giving YSR awards to sportspersons to encourage them."

After reaching Hyderabad from Tokyo via Delhi, Sindhu received a rousing welcome in Telangana state as well. V. Srinivas Goud, the Telangana Sports Minister, was present at the airport to personally welcome her along with other senior officials.

Goud also met Sindhu before leaving for Tokyo and playfully engaged in a short badminton game with her.

Several Tollywood actors celebrated the badminton superstar's success with equal zest, including Lakshmi Manchu, Mahesh Babu, Varun Tej, Sharat Chandra and others.

Telugu film legend and megastar from Mogalturu village Chiranjeevi said: "Congrats Sindhu on winning the medal and creating history for being the first Indian woman to bring Olympic medal twice in a row."

Outside the sporting realm, the badminton virtuoso unites both the states by embracing and revering deities in the Telugu states.

She is a regular at Lal Darwaza Mahankali temple Bonalu celebrations. Like a traditional Telangana girl, Sindhu carries the �Bonam' during the popular festival in Hyderabad.

Similarly, she has great devotion for Kanakadurgamma at Indrakeeladri in Vijayawada. She visited Kanakadurgamma temple on her return from Tokyo along with her family members.

Sindhu said she is a devotee of the deity and visits the temple regularly.
The shuttler not only unites but has also inspired a generation of young people with her sporting excellence, resulting in more youngsters taking up the sport nowadays in the Telugu states. Sindhu and her victories are leaving a lasting positive effect on both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as the whole nation. #KhabarLive #hydnews

Political Love Fest: We Pledge To 'Protect' Women On Rakhi, But Forget To Treat Them As Equal Citizens

Misogyny remains misogyny even if you tie a rakhi on it. A woman ties "Rakhi" onto the wrists of a man sitting inside a passenger bus during Raksha Bandhan celebrations in Kolkata.

I don't know about brothers and sisters, but for politicians, Rakhi seems to have become the festival of binding ties. Politicians are very busy this Rakhi, tying themselves into knots.

Speciasl Report: Inside The Surreal Battle For Mind Control Playing Out In Rajasthan's Classrooms

From history to politics to math, text books are throwing caution to the wind, as teachers grow divided.

For someone who is courageously speaking truth to power, 51-year-old Mahavir Sihag is exceedingly soft spoken. On occasion, you have to remind him to speak louder, so that you can hear.

Animal Rights Activists Face Cattle Smugglers’ Ire

While incidents of violence purported by cow vigilantes hit the headlines, what has gone relatively unnoticed is an ever increasing spate of attacks on animal rights activists who dared to take on the smugglers of cattle and other animals.

Some of these activists, whom INNLIVE interviewed, said there is little organised resistance to the illegal trade of meat, as vigilance at the sale points and at the highways remains lax.

Animal Trafficking Is Helping Terrorism Grow Despite Demonetisation

Illegal camel trade and terrorism are seldom mentioned in the same breath. A car rally was held in the national capital on February 2 by NGOs Dhyan Foundation and People For Animals (PFA) to protest atrocities on animals and the illegal trade of animals smuggled into Bangladesh via Bihar and West Bengal.

“United Humans Against Atrocities on Animals” was the theme of the rally, which started at Kasturba Gandhi Marg and made its first stop at the office of the resident commissioner for West Bengal at Baba Kharak Singh Marg - moving on to Bihar Bhawan in Chanakyapuri.

Now, It's Time For Cowpathy - A startup Is Looking To Rule India’s Cow Economy With Dung Soap And Urine Toothpaste

A cow is silhouetted in front of manure at the farm owned by French farmer Franck Pellerin (not pictured) in La Chapelle-Caro, central Brittany, France, September 2, 2015.

You’ve heard of ayurveda, the traditional Indian medical science. So have you about Unani, the Perso-Arabic healing science. Then there is homeopathy.

Now prepare for Cowpathy.

No, it is not a whole new medical system. It is a Mumbai-based company that makes consumer products said to have high medicinal value and completely based on the cow—it uses ingredients such as dung, urine, clarified butter or ghee, and others.

‘Maybe It Is Time To Change My Son’s Name’: The New Reality Of Being Muslim In India

Rumours, lies, violence and political support for bigotry embolden many Hindus to reveal hidden prejudices.

Saira does not call her son by his name when they are out of the house. “I prefer using J, it doesn’t have a Muslim ring to it,” said Saira, 40, a former colleague whose first name I have changed on her request and whose Muslim identity was never previously a point of discussion. “I cringe as I say this, but it is true.”

Whenever J asked his mother the difference between him and his friends, she always told him there was none. They were all Indian with different names, she said. That explanation, an evidently troubled Saira told me, is weakening at a time of uncommon anti-Muslim prejudice and violence.

India’s most prolific hackathon winner never went to an IIT

"No matter how much I'm going to study...just studies is not going to be enough."

A farmer’s son who didn’t own a computer until college has become the toast of India’s hackathon scene.

Now a prominent face in the circuit, Ravi Suhag has made it a habit of sorts to win hackathons, where programmers from different fields—students, employees, hobbyists—get together to code over a short period of time. Each event usually has a prescribed challenge that coders solve over, say, 48 hours, either individually or in small groups.

Opinion: Lynching The Diversity Out Of India

The new jungle justice system has obviously been given political imprimatur.

Junaid Khan, 15 years young, had gone for Eid shopping with his brothers to Delhi. He was never to return. On his way home to Ballabgarh, a hate-fuelled group of men pounced on him. He was stabbed during the attack and literally bled to death in excruciating pain. His brothers were assaulted too, but escaped with their lives. Beef eaters, yelled the rancorous chorus. No one in the train compartment helped. Junaid is the latest victim of the rising violent culture of cow-related mob lynching in India. It is a Frankenstein's monster on the loose taking giant strides. The ominous predator is out there as you read this.

Exclusive: Race To Rashtrapathi Bhavan

2019 Calculations May Decide BJP’s Choices For President, Vice President. The unexpected is widely expected. The Modi government likes to surprise, keeping its cards close to its chest until it has to play them. We will know the name of the BJP's nominee for the post of President of India on 23 June and it may be none of the names in speculation until 22 June.

RERA Myths Busted: No Big Relief For Stuck Home Buyers, House Prices Won't Rise

The dust has finally settled on RERA or the Real Estate Regulation & Development Act. From Monday (1 May 2017) it comes into force across India, and the day will be remembered as a special day for home buyers who have been committing the largest chunk of their life savings to an industry which has been free for all.

A press release from the Housing Ministry stated how this day marks the end of a 9-year-long wait; and for the first time 76,000 companies engaged in building and construction activities across the country will become accountable for quality and delivery. Union Minister for Housing Venkaiah Naidu in his tweets called it the beginning of a new era making buyer the king, while the developers benefit from the confidence of a King in the regulated environment.

An Indian politician gifts brides laundry bats to tackle abusive husbands

This minister’s message to Indian women is simple: “If your alcoholic husband is physically abusive, thrash him.”

When one suffering woman asked Madhya Pradesh minister Gopal Bhargava if it was all right to beat up her abusive spouse with a mogri, the wooden bat traditionally used to wash clothes, he took the idea seriously. After all, Bhargava had been receiving numerous such complaints.

From identity to economics: How the BJP is changing Indian politics

After tactically using caste arithmetic, the party has also consciously tried to undermine social justice as casteism and secularism as appeasement.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results are not a one-time anomaly. They are repeat of the 2014 Lok Sabha results. In fact, the Bharatiya Janata Party has improved on its performance in 2014. Because the party seems set to stay in Indian politics for a long innings, it is important to reflect on what its politics means and what it is doing or going to do once in power in such an overwhelming manner.

While the BJP has cynically employed the use of religious identity, it has also consciously sought to downplay identity politics or social justice on the basis of caste or community in the last decade, particularly in the last few years. This is clear from the way the party brought a non-Jat politician to lead Haryana and encouraged a counter-mobilisation against the Jat hegemony. It also appointed a non-tribal chief minister Jharkhand and has persisted with one in Chhatisgarh. The party does not even seem to mind a Gujarati hegemony.

Where the party excels at is to package and present itself as rising above caste and community, decrying social justice as casteism, and secularism as appeasement, as Vandita Mishra points out in the Indian Express, after having carefully and “astutely picking a large number of its candidates from the large scatter of non-Yadav OBC [Other Backward Classes] castes, for instance, to add them to its traditional upper caste Brahmin-Thakur mix”, even while making a pronounced bid for backward caste support.

In fact, the success of the party’s political vision is evident from the fact that what appeared earlier as impossible seems to be the new normal now. For example, in a state like Jharkhand, the party brought in fundamental change by amending the land tenancy laws so as to serve the corporate capital and yet there was hardly any effective resistance to the move.

Most of the BJP’s important leaders also happen to be well-honed cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The party seems to have made an effort to ensure that such candidates are given crucial postings, with a view to a more disciplined and ideologically committed leadership for the governments – at the Centre and in the states.

In other words, the BJP has sought to downplay one of the traditional basis of politics – that of social identities – because it hampers growth and expansion of capital.

The 2014 Lok Sabha results and now the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results have shown how the BJP has created an anti-local, anti-caste, anti-region political ambience by ensuring that a combination of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah become acceptable to people across regions.

The Manifesto of the party for Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections began by saying:

“The Party has begun the implementation of aims of social and economic justice through good governance (sushashan) under the leadership of Shri Narendra Modi”.

Beyond this point the Manifesto talked in an idiom of class and professions, laying down how the party’s perspective on and vision of development has to reach the youth, poor, business community, women and others.

The party simply does not use the concept of social justice the way other political formations do.

Economic argument
It is in this sense that one can see how the BJP seeks to build a political agenda beyond the social identities. It tries to reach out to all of them through some economic argument or the other.

The party seems to know and understand that gradually it has to be a politics of class, which will allow it to expand because its historical legacy of being a brahmanical political force alienated it for quite some time from the Muslims and Dalits.

In the last three years or so, the party has amply shown how well religion and other social and cultural affiliations can only be used to ensure a very clearly defined rule of corporate capital. However, these affiliations along with that of nation, and other such are only instruments for mobilisation, if at all.

The violence in campuses could be seen as an example of how the party uses the instrument of lumpenism to ensure that voices of dissent can be suppressed by use of collective force.

Social justice is not a term often invoked by the Indian State after 2014. And yet the BJP cannot completely do away with the decades-long practices of positive discrimination in policy making because the move might invite strong counter mobilisation against it. Which is what explains the party’s conscious decision of going slow on its earlier discourse and policy programmes based on social identities. But the so-called slips of tongue on quotas and reservation and demonisation of Dalit activists is a clear indication of what many of the party’s leaders think on these questions.

In days to come, the BJP would rather focus on policy areas that would more proactively bring Dalits and tribals within the fold of the market. The policy decisions of the BJP are aimed at breaking the consensus on the need of taking affirmative action to remove social inequalities among groups.

Social reengineering
The BJP seeks to transform everybody into an individual, concerned only about their own self, while ironically seeking votes from them or expressing outrage in the name of Hinduism. The collective, as noted above, continues to be invoked when needed but only as a mere source of mobilisation to move towards a fragmented/individuated situation.

This thinking, while destroying their social and cultural allegiances, would transform each citizen into somebody who would cease to be concerned about the marginalised, oppressed or discriminated groups and communities. This would also lead to weakening of any opposition to whatever the state would do – from handing over the economy to corporate capital to making education institutions into skilling centres among other things.

​The BJP campaigns in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections mocked the gains that the Other Backward Classes and Dalit political mobilisations have made in these states. The party has routinely sought to underplay that there was any significant historic element of caste based discrimination. In Haryana, for instance, the party has come down heavily on unionisation of workers in the industrial belts of the state.

It has thus sought to delegitimise all movements that claim to represent social or economic justice. Which is why there is hardly any large scale resistance even when, for instance, the Haryana government unabashedly celebrates its foundation year using the symbol of a conch with a chariot embedded in it among other things. The party has thus got away by introducing overtly religious motifs in a secular country. Nor is there any public anger when workers are

The BJP represents a new moment in Indian politics. It understands and knows how to manipulate the social and cultural milieu much better than any other force towards making India fully compatible to the workings of corporate capital and seeking to break down the consensus on community and caste-based concepts of social justice.

If the political forces fail to understand this they would find it difficult to counter the BJP’s winning streak, even in 2019.

Will Indian Politicians Ever Stop Using Champion Athletes For Personal Glory?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

Fights over Sakshi Malik, PV Sindhu and Dipa Karmakar highlight the disturbing mentality of our political class.

It is said that history only remembers the winners. History may well be kind to victors, but there is one section of society which uses them like trending topics on Twitter or Google, shamelessly riding their popularity to draw attention to themselves.

Health Crisis: India's Wealthier States Are Showing An Alarming Decline In Immunisation Process

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

The warning signs from the latest National Family Health Survey data have gone unnoticed so far.

A fair amount of media attention has been given to the resurgence of diphtheria in Kerala, which has been attributed to some Muslims rejecting immunisation efforts due to misinformation. However, a much more dangerous and widespread trend of declining immunisation rates as evidenced by the recent National Family Health Survey 4 data, seems to have gone entirely unnoticed.

EDUCATING INDIA 1 - The Haryana Paradox: As Enrolment Falls In Govt Schools, Teachers Competing For Jobs

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

The fear of being declared ‘surplus’ is forcing government school teachers to canvass in their local communities for admissions.

Anil Kumar is a volunteer social science teacher at the Government High School in Umrawat, in Bhiwani district of Haryana. He teaches Classes 6 to 10, two hours a day on all school days. For a year until he came along, the school had no social science teacher. Principal Wazir Singh, a former high school mathematics teacher, and the school’s science teachers stood in during social science classes. “It's just not the same thing,” Wazir Singh said, “as having a trained subject teacher.”

Exclusive Reporting Survey: What’s Working In Indian Schools?

INNLIVE's senior correspondent Likhaveer will spend the next six months reporting from various parts of the country to try and build a picture of what really goes on in India's schools.

Most Indian children of school-going age can’t really read. If they do read, it is likely they don’t understand what they are reading. On paper, most of them are in school. In reality, it’s a little hard to tell. Only a third of the children who start school, actually finish school. Most people believe that learning English is a passport to a better life, but teachers aren’t equipped enough to teach the language.

Dark Night Advisories: How Raj-Era Prejudice Still Taints Police Attitudes Towards 'Criminal Tribes'?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

The authorities in North India believe that it is necessary to treat these communities differently.

About once every month, police departments in North Indian states issue rather unique instructions to those on the beat: “Dark Night” advisories that alert police teams about potential strikes by dangerous gangs that usually contain more than a few references to communities once known as criminal tribes.

Wrath Of Gau Rakshaks: Recall Gandhi’s Words On Hypocrisy Of Cow Protection

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

“Oh Hindu brothers, help us… those who are Hindus should assemble for cow protection and should write and make over five ‘chitthis’ to others, failing which he will be sinful of killing five cows.” These circular letters called patias were distributed all over Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from 1885 onwards to stoke communal passion.

Cow Calculus: What Modi Stood To Lose By Keeping Silent On 'Gau Rakshaks'

By AJAZ ASHRAF | INNLIVE

The prime minister deserves praise for criticising cow-protection vigilantes. Now he must walk the talk.

Regardless of whether you endorse the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology, one cannot but appreciate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to belatedly emerge from the cocoon of silence to condemn cow-protection groups.