Nice girls don't cry

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Tehelka, India's 'Private Eye', founded by Tarun Tejpal, has thrived on sensational sting operations. Few suspected that Tejpal, and the reputation of his paper, would be stung so critically by the e-mailed allegation of one of his junior woman colleagues about being molested by him, complete with CCTV footage of the Goa hotel where the ugly incident happened. These are the kind of evidence that Tejpal revelled in for destroying reputation of the bold and the beautiful. It was a comeuppance that Tehelka's readers least expected.

"An Equal Muslim"

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Harish Gupta

Why is the 'Muslim factor' so germane to all political calculations for India? It has been so not merely in recent times but since the very beginning of the republic, when the majority opinion in the Constituent Assembly stood against tampering with the Muslim, or any community's personal laws, pushing the promise of having a uniform civil code into the cold storage of the "Directive Principles of State Policy". Since elections began in post-Independence India in 1952, the 'M vote' has remained a matter of ponderous poll-eve calculation.