<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-9026134102896044"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Today, 23 July, is the 111th birth anniversary of Chandra Shekhar Azad, one of the greatest leaders of the Indian freedom movement. Azad led the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), India’s premier revolutionary, anti-Imperialist organisation. Earlier, when the organisation was called HRA, Ram Prasad Bismil was the chief. Azad took over the leadership after Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaque Ullah, Roshan Singh, and Rajendra Lahiri, the leading lights of the HRA, were arrested. All four were hanged at different places. HRA’s spine was broken. Yet, along with Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, Azad rebuilt the party as a socialist organisation committed to the overthrow of the British regime. Despite being a leftist, Azad never gave up wearing the sacred religious thread (Janeu) ....

Aggressive hashtags and spittle-flying anchors go about business with Pakistani intrusions or LoC ceasefire violations but all go meek when it comes to Chinese incursions. Indian TV channels are known to go into an overheated frenzy each time there is a border issue with Pakistan. However, provocative statements like, “The Indian military can choose to return to its territory with dignity, or be kicked out of the area by Chinese soldiers,” by the Chinese State media, which has been at its chauvinistic best in response to the recent flare-up in tension between India and China, got little response from the Indian media. The border standoff started over India’s objection to a Chinese road construction through Doklam plateau and soon escalated with China destroying two Indian Army bunkers and stopping sections of the Mansarovar yatra. Let us see if their coverage of the Chinese aggression matches up to the jingoi...

It is one thing for Twitter trolls to use posts from satirical websites for political propaganda. However, for main stream media outlets to promote satire as news is quite disturbing. It shows how the process of news making lacks the due diligence in a few organisations. Sometime ago, Aajtak had published a  fake fatwa  about men being allowed to eat their wives if they are extremely hungry. Pune Mirror had published the  same fake fatwa  in their newspaper. It  turned out to be  a sarcastic column written by a satirist Moroccan blogger called Israfel al-Maghribi. Yesterday, yet another set of news organisations have fallen for a piece of satire claiming a Pakistani man was sentenced to death due to farting in mosques during Ramzan. This satirical post was published by a website called  World News Daily Report . The website carries a disclaimer at the bottom of every page on its website stating that the nature of their content is entirely fiction...