Free Republic

New Delhi — The family and followers of one of India’s wealthiest Hindu spiritual leaders are fighting a legal battle over whether he is dead or simply in a deep state of meditation. His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, the founder of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan religious order, with a property estate worth an estimated US$167-million, died in January, according to his wife and son. However, his disciples at his ashram have refused to let the family take his body for cremation because they claim he is still alive. According to his followers, based in the Punjab city of Jalandhar,...

Indian police have arrested one man and are looking for four other suspects after two teenage girls were gang-raped and then hanged from a tree in a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said on Thursday. The two cousins, who were from a low-caste Dalit community and aged 14 and 15, went missing from their village home in Uttar Pradesh's Budaun district when they went out to go to the toilet on Tuesday evening. The following morning, villagers found the bodies of the two teenagers hanging from a mango tree in a nearby orchard. "We have registered...

New Delhi: One of every three people, or almost 2.1 billion of the world’s population is either obese or overweight, according to the Global Burden of Disease study published in Lancet medical journal on Thursday which analyses data from 188 countries between 1990 and 2013. Almost 37% of the world’s men are overweight or obese, up from 29% in 1980. And almost 38% of the world’s women are, up from 30% in 1980. According to the study, 13% of the obese people in the world are in the US and 15% in China and India — an indication of how...

Full Title: Democratic amnesty fan Luis Gutierrez helping Eric Cantor get reelected in order to protect immigration reform I’m late to this story but Mickey Kaus and David Steinberg are all over it. You know the background here: Eric Cantor, who’s been on the outs with House conservatives lately and who’s championed immigration reform for DREAMers for more than a year, is suddenly facing a surprisingly tough primary challenge in Virginia from Dave Brat, who’s attacked him for being soft on amnesty. How tough? Tough enough that Cantor recently ran away from Jeff Denham’s ENLIST Act for DREAMers despite having...

Eric Cantor once praised Congressman Gutiérrez for his leadership on the issue of amnesty. Congressman Gutiérrez is here to set up a great deception that will allow Eric Cantor to claim he is opposed to amnesty, at the eleventh hour, just two weeks prior to the primary on June 10th. Congressman Cantor has spent countless dollars claiming that I’m a “liberal college professor.” This is the act of a desperate campaign. I am more conservative than Eric Cantor across-the-board. I am the constitutional conservative in this race. Eric Cantor is trying to buy this election with corporate cash from Los...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor faced criticism over immigration from right and left Wednesday, laying bare the rough politics of the issue even as President Barack Obama sought to increase pressure on House Republicans to act. Cantor’s Tea Party opponent in Virginia’s June 10 GOP primary, Dave Brat, convened a news conference on the steps of the Virginia Capitol to label Cantor a top cheerleader for “amnesty” in the House, citing Cantor’s support for action on certain immigration measures. A short time later, in a conference room inside the state Capitol, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a leading proponent of overhauling...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Wednesday stressed his support for a legalization measure for young undocumented immigrants in the military, after he was criticized by advocates who see him as the main obstacle to immigration reform. In an interview with POLITICO, Cantor said he backs the policy merits of the legislation from Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), which would give a path to legal permanent residency for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

Poorna is a member of India's lowest Dalit caste previously known as 'untouchables'A 13-year-old poor Indian schoolgirl has become the youngest female to summit Mount Everest, following a difficult and dangerous climb from China's Tibetan side, her expedition organiser said Monday. Malavath Poorna, the daughter of a tribal farm labourer, reached the top of the world's highest peak on Sunday after climbing from the Tibetan side of the mountain, said Mohammed Ansari, technical coordinator for her team. Poorna and 16-year-old friend S Anand Kumar, a member of India's lowest Dalit caste previously known as "untouchables", climbed the mountain with ten...

The office of Prime Minister-designate Narendra Modi on Sunday night, hours before he takes over as India’s 15th prime minister, indicated a smaller size of the next government and clubbing of ministries for smarter governance. A note from Modi’s secretariat said the PM-designate had “made a dent” in ministry formation by adopting, for the first time, a guiding principle of “Minimum Government and Maximum Governance”. “It is a good beginning in transforming entity of assembled ministries to organic ministries. It will bring more coordination between different departments, will be more effective and bring a speed in process,” the note stated....

A court in India's capital has dropped a weapons charge against a New York City police officer and is allowing him to leave the country, his lawyer said Saturday. Officer Manny Encarnacion was arrested in March while visiting his wife in New Delhi after Indian airport authorities discovered three bullets he had accidentally packed in his luggage. He had been out on bail since his arrest, but was barred from leaving India until the case was resolved. Before leaving for India, Encarnacion went to a police firing range and put the bullets in a coat pocket, according to New York...

All the four gunmen, who had stormed the Indian consulate in Afghanistan's Herat province early on Friday, have been gunned down, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) chief Subhas Goswami said. Gunmen armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades had attacked the Indian consulate but no diplomatic staff was injured in the assault. "One terrorist was killed by ITBP personnel while three have been killed by Afghan forces. The attack has been successfully repulsed," he said. Goswami also said security at the Indian embassy in Kabul and consulates in Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar besides Herat has been heightened and a high alert...

Dear bleeding heart secularists, I hope, despite having to nurse your recent wounds, you’re sitting somewhere safe in your psychological darkness that you have constructed around yourself. Since lots of open letters are being written to Narendra Modi advising him how to respect the secular and pluralistic fabric of the country I thought well, why not I too participate in this stimulating epistolary exchange, and hence, this open letter. I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is going to be a “communal” government at the center despite your relentless pursuit to achieve the...

Newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has officially invited Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Modi’s inauguration ceremony, according to India’s victorious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BBC reported that this is believed to be the first time an olive branch of this magnitude has been extended to Pakistan’s Prime Minister. On May 16, Modi and the BJP were victorious in an Indian election that experienced the highest quantitative voter turnout in history. Modi is set to take the oath as India’s new leader on May 26. In addition to Pakistan, Modi has also reached out to neighboring states...

Narendra Modi will be the next prime minister of India, but until Friday, he was banned from traveling to the US because of allegations related to a 2002 riot. It's a new complication for already-rocky US-India relations. On Friday, President Obama did what just about everyone knew he must and invited Narendra Modi, India's new prime-minister-in-waiting, to the United States. It was anything but a routine invitation. Mr. Modi remains the only person ever to be banned from traveling to the United States under the International Religious Freedom Act. Until Friday, the Obama administration had not officially clarified whether the...

WASHINGTON — The United States' top naval officer said the Navy’s growing presence in the Asia-Pacific region is beginning to show results and shape events, but acknowledges it will be ‘a long-term effort.’ Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, said he hopes the U.S. Navy will be able to expand cooperation with India once its new government takes its place. Speaking Monday at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Greenert said the growing military-to-military dialogue with China is beginning to show results, especially in the South China Sea, where maritime tensions between China and its...

After five weeks, and more than 800 million ballots cast, the largest election in the history of mankind ended with a landslide win—announced on Sunday—for India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. The bjp is now set to form a new government under Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi. Modi’s mammoth victory means he has something no ruler of India has had for over 30 years: an absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament. This gives him powers his predecessors could only have dreamed of—and the indications are that he will use it. “Good days are coming,” Modi said in a victory speech....

Is the election of a pro-business, pro-American, growth-oriented prime minister in the world's largest democracy good news or bad news for the world's oldest democracy? We in that oldest democracy are currently governed by the Democrats, a party that has more in common with the defeated Congress party in India than with the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party. You could tell that the White House was less than overjoyed at the election of Narendra Modi when the spokesman recited boilerplate praise of a "free and fair election." Are there sensitivities regarding this particular small-government guy? Sure. India is not Indiana. The...

The majority party and its leader Narenda Modi have ridden the wave of religious fanaticism. Minorities are appealing to the legacy of democracy and pluralism India is officially in the hands of the Hindu right wing. The Catholic Church and other religious minorities are concerned but they are grinning and bearing it, grasping onto the old and deep-rooted legacy of democratic values and pluralism that characterizes the Indian nation. Their concerns stem from the contiguity of India’s leaders with groups of Hindu fanatics. This is the landscape that has been emerging in the Indian sub-continent since the official general election...

The results of India's election, which are rapidly appearing today, seem to show a huge win for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A victory had been expected, but this looks like a massive landslide. The next prime minister is almost certain to be Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, a state in western India. He is known for his economic agenda, which is seen to be relatively business-friendly (expect stocks to react very positively to the news), and his controversial brand of Hinduism. Modi's ideology is certainly going to be important over the next several years, but his...

The White House welcomed the overwhelming victory of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha polls, offering its congratulations to the BJP on its “historic” win and assuring, “We look forward to working with [the new Indian government] once formed to advance our partnership.” However, while numerous world leaders, including Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Australia’s Tony Abbott reportedly called Mr. Modi to personally congratulate him, U.S. President Barack Obama had not yet done so, at the time this story was filed, at around 11am on Friday Eastern Standard Time.(Here's the catch) An official at the White House’s National...