Jai Bhagwan Goyal, a hardcore Shiv Sena activist, has reportedly claimed to have confessed that he took part in Kar Seva campaign with an intention to demolish Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. He disclosed that Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray had directed him to participate in Kar Seva campaign. “Yes! I pulled down Babri Masjid during Kar Seva campaign,” he added. Goyal is particularly known as a star campaigner of Sena in North India. He play...

The Gujarat government’s decision to appoint retired judge Akshay Mehta in the Nanavati Commission probing the 2002 Godhra incident and the riots thereafter has led to shrill protests from riots victims and lawyers as well as rights activists. They said the judge’s name had come up in a TV sting operation a few months ago, in which a Sangh Parivar man and key accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre had bragged that Justice Mehta was “our man”.

The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team on April 8 began its probe into the 11 most serious incidents that occurred during the anti-Muslim communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002. Over 90 people were butchered and some of them were burnt alive at Naroda Patiya, while five others were chased and killed in the adjacent Naroda Gam on February 28, 2002.

According to a report, team members visited Naroda Gam and looked into the working of the Meghaninagar police station, w...

“The harassment, torture and arrests of a number of Muslims at several places in Madhya Pradesh, at the stance of Saffro-nazis has dismayed and alarmed Muslims of the State,” said State Convenor Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat Madhya Pradesh Syed Irshad Ali in a statement on April 11.

The law enforcing agencies have implicated a number of hapless Muslim youth and detained them for their alleged links with the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Mr. Ali furth...

The Supreme Court on April 10 upheld the law enacted by the Centre in 2006 providing a quota of 27 per cent for candidates belonging to the Other Backward Classes in Central higher educational institutions. But it directed the government to exclude the ‘creamy layer’ among the OBCs while implementing the law. A five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan thus paved the way to giving effect to the Central Educational Institutions (Reservations in Admis...

The Jamia Millia Islamia has established an exclusive evening higher secondary Urdu medium school for girls, the first of its kind that will provide various facilities including all women faculty, exclusively Urdu medium with the stress on science and computers and no age bar for females to study. The effort is likely to boost the confidence among girls to continue the education, especially the people with meagre resources and those who are discouraged from continuing education.