Latest news with #Sahni
Straits Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Straits Times
What is The Resistance Front, designated by U.S. as 'terrorist' group?
Find out what's new on ST website and app. The U.S. government has designated The Resistance Front, also known as the Kashmir Resistance, as a "foreign terrorist organisation" following an April 22 Islamist militant attack in Indian Kashmir that killed 26 people. The group initially took responsibility for the attack in Pahalgam before denying it days later. Following are some facts about the group. WHAT IS TRF? TRF emerged in 2019 and is considered an offshoot of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a Delhi-based think tank. Indian security officials said TRF uses the name Kashmir Resistance on social media and online forums, where it claimed responsibility for Tuesday's attack in Indian Kashmir's Pahalgam area. Lashkar-e-Taiba, listed as a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States, is the Islamist group accused of plotting attacks in India and in the West, including the three-day assault on Mumbai in November 2008. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore Up to 30% of aviation jobs would have to be redesigned because of AI, automation: CAAS Singapore Alleged Kpod peddler filmed trying to flee raid in Bishan charged with 6 offences Business Global fintech firms expanding in Singapore with larger offices, APAC hubs Singapore 5 foreigners charged over scheme to deliberately get arrested in S'pore to sell sex drugs Life Kinokuniya opens third bookstore in Raffles City, weeks ahead of schedule Life F1 Singapore Grand Prix: Music acts Lewis Capaldi, Clean Bandit, Spice Girls' Melanie C added World Trump threatens to sue WSJ over story on alleged 2003 letter to Epstein Asia Appointment of Malaysia's new chief justice eases controversy over vacant top judge seats for now "This is basically a front of the LeT. These are groups which have been created over the last years, particularly when Pakistan was under pressure from the Financial Action Task Force and they were trying to create a pattern of denial that they were involved in terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir," said Ajai Sahni, head of the South Asia Terrorism Portal. HOW HAS THE PROBE ADVANCED? On June 22, India's anti-terror National Investigation Agency said it had arrested two men who harboured three militants involved in the Pahalgam attack. The agency said in a statement that the arrested men had revealed the identities of the attackers, and confirmed they were Pakistani nationals affiliated to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. WHAT HAS THE GROUP DONE? The group has not previously had any large incidents attributed to it, according to Sahni. "All TRF operations are essentially LeT operations. There will be some measure of operational freedom as to where they hit on the ground, but the sanction would have come from the LeT," Sahni said. WHAT DOES INDIA SAY ABOUT TRF? India's interior ministry told parliament in 2023 that the group had been involved in the planning of killings of security force personnel and civilians in Jammu and Kashmir. The group also co-ordinated the recruitment of militants and the smuggling of weapons and narcotics across the border, the ministry said. Intelligence officials told Reuters that TRF had also been issuing online threats against pro-India groups for the past two years. WHAT DOES PAKISTAN SAY? Pakistan has denied that it supports and funds militants in Kashmir, saying it offers only moral and diplomatic support. REUTERS
Time of India
15-07-2025
- Time of India
One held for throwing stone at Vande Bharat Express
Patna: Railway Protection Force (RPF) in Muzaffarpur arrested a person in connection with a stone-pelting incident at the Gorakhpur-Patliputra Junction Vande Bharat Express (26502). The incident occurred while the train was moving from Muzaffarpur station around 11.05am on Monday, damaging the window panes of coach C2. No one was injured in the incident, said Muzaffarpur RPF inspector, Manish Kumar. The arrested person was identified as Suresh Sahni (40), a resident of Kurhani in Muzaffarpur district. The stone-throwing caused partial damage to the coach but did not affect the operation of the train, Kumar said, adding that the RPF escort on the train, led by Abhisek Kumar, informed the Muzaffarpur RPF post about the incident that took place hardly 200 metres away from Muzaffarpur station. Immediately, an RPF team led by SI Sushmita Kumari, rushed to the spot and took Sahni into custody, he said. A case was registered against Sahni under Sections 153 and 147 of the Railway Protection Force Act, which pertain to malicious acts intended to endanger the safety of railway passengers and property. Following the arrest, he was handed over to the Muzaffarpur GRP for further legal proceedings. He was produced in the court on Tuesday, the RPF inspector said.
Indian Express
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
25 years of Jaideep Sahni: From Chak De! India to Khosla ka Ghosla, how the screenwriting genius consistently chronicled a country's struggle to understand itself
Writing is a daunting task. To lay bare your thoughts on paper is no less than a nightmare. It wounds before it heals. But screenwriting? It takes the nightmare further. To translate thought into character, politics into plot, ache into arc, and more significantly, to smuggle meaning into spectacle, to lace ideology into the laugh lines, to neither pander nor preach, but still make them feel, that, too, is triggering, traumatic, troublesome, and then, somehow, therapeutic. But to top it all is the challenge of doing this within the belly of the mainstream. Subversion: a word now tossed around like loose change. But to subvert and still sell tickets, to reshape and still stay bankable, is worse than a nightmare. That is a dream very few survive. And if the current cinematic trends tell us anything, it is how rare that survivor is. How few manage to hold both the crowd and the conscience. But if a screenwriter has done it consistently, then in this moment, in this time, there is arguably only one. Jaideep Sahni. Sahni, in his twenty-five-year-long journey as a screenwriter (beginning with Jungle, which released on this very day), has penned seven films since then. Five of them are with the powerhouse Yash Raj Films. Two are with the once-disruptive, then-dominant Ram Gopal Varma. One is with Shah Rukh Khan. Others feature stalwarts like Suniel Shetty, Ajay Devgn, Madhuri Dixit, and Rani Mukerji. Woven in between are the newcomers of their time, Vivek Oberoi, Abhishek Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, and Sushant Singh Rajput, each of whom rose to carve their own place in the firmament. There were also those from another era, the old guards of the screen: Amitabh Bachchan, Rishi Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Anupam Kher and Navin Nischol, who too found a renewed rhythm in his lines. If his writing gave voice to a new generation of directors, like Shaad Ali, Dibakar Banerjee, Shimit Amin, and Maneesh Sharma, then it also offered the old masters, like Varma, a fresh vocabulary within the familiar grammar of the genre. What sets Sahni apart is not simply what he wrote, but what he revealed. His screenplays are replete with the contradictions that define India. The tensions that fracture it and the forces that bind it. In his stories, the personal is never separate from the political, and the spectacle is inseparable from the subtext. It is as if he composes social maps, chronicles emotional cartographies, and draws blueprints of a nation in flux. It is as if he writes about a country trying to make sense of itself. Most of his films draw their charge from the socio-economic undercurrents that shape the lives of their characters. So in Company, the story unfolds in the shadows of a post–License Raj India: a landscape where opportunity was gated, and those without access were left to their own devices. Out of that inequality, as if inevitably, rose a revolution with guns. The gangsters, once outlaws, soon became the system. And when we meet these gangsters, Malik (Ajay Devgn) and Chandu (Vivek Oberoi), we see not just criminals, but agents of a new order. They are going global now, riding the wave of liberalisation. Liberalisation eventually became a recurring theme that Sahni kept returning to across his filmography. So say, in Bunty Aur Babli and Khosla Ka Ghosla, he tapped into both the middle-class ambition that gives us wings and the middle-class morality that gently pulls us back to the ground. Morality, in Sahni's world, is not didactic but lived. It is a persistent thread that guides his characters, but also sometimes derails them. Though both films present themselves as caper comedies, they are punctuated with moments of profound moral clarity. In each, it is the elder, the weathered voice of experience, who pauses the momentum to offer the younger one a truth. Bachchan in Bunty Aur Babli, and Kher in Khosla Ka Ghosla. Push a little further into his filmography, and you'll find the same thread in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, where Chopra's character becomes the moral anchor to Kapoor's drift. Seen now, these scenes do more than simply move the plot forward. They are sort of masterclasses, as sort of reference points for contemporary screenwriters still learning how to tell stories with both edge and conscience. Also Read | Khosla Ka Ghosla is 15: Rishi Kapoor was first offered Anupam Kher's role, Dibakar Banerjee did not want Boman Irani as villain It is this strange sincerity that lends Sahni's stories their weight and panache. At their heart, all his films are wrestling with the status quo. They are filled with characters at the disadvantaged end of power, outsiders and underdogs in every sense, who stand up against an establishment that offers them nothing but rejection, ridicule, or humiliation. Of course, the seminal sports drama Chak De! India is the most iconic expression of this motif. And the same thread runs through Khosla Ka Ghosla, Aaja Nachle, and Rocket Singh. But it's also evident even in a seemingly lighter film like Shuddh Desi Romance, where we find Raghu (Rajput) and Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) rebelling against the institution of marriage, with disbelief, and disinterest. And Sahni's choice to set the film in Jaipur, or to let much of Aaja Nachle unfold in a small town called Shamli, is itself a subtle departure from mainstream cinematic norms. In doing so, he not only brings us characters who are more vibrant, more earthy, and often more humorous than their metropolitan counterparts, but also far more defiant. These are small-town rebels, torn between tradition and transformation. They are constantly contradicting themselves, caught in a cultural tug-of-war: modern enough to want freedom, rooted enough to still feel its guilt. It is within this contradiction that Sahni finds his most fertile ground. Perhaps that's why his characters so often struggle with, a kind of existential or even identity crisis that runs beneath their actions like an undertow. Perhaps that's why this is best captured in the way so many of his protagonists seem uncomfortable with their own names. And so, of course, Cherry (Parvin Dabas) wants to rid himself of Chiraunji Lal Khosla, the name given to him by his grandmother. And Raghu doesn't quite like it when his Tauji (Kapoor) insists on calling him Raghu Ram, as if the full name somehow fixes him to a version of himself he doesn't accept. This discomfort isn't isolated. It surfaces again and again, in characters like Rakesh (Bachchan) and Vimmi (Mukerji), who don the identities of Bunty and Babli as if to escape the weight of their small-town ordinariness. Harpreet Singh Bedi (Kapoor) becomes Rocket Singh, not just a pseudonym, but a new framework for ambition. Chandrakant (Oberoi) prefers Chandu in Company, a name that makes him sharper, more agile. On the surface, these may appear as minor narrative choices, simple character quirks. But beneath them lies a deeper preoccupation, Sahni's, persistent interest in mapping the restlessness of a generation caught between inheritance and reinvention. His characters are not merely changing names; they are attempting to unbind themselves from systems, traditions, and identities that no longer fit. What is even more exemplary is that Sahni, despite working largely within Yash Raj Films and under the production gaze of Aditya Chopra, has consistently managed to subvert the YRF template from within. It takes a particular kind of conviction to write a film like Bunty Aur Babli, where the characters don't dream of going abroad or becoming NRIs to climb the traditional ladders of success (unlike the protagonists of many Yash Raj films of the '90s) but instead choose to stay, to scheme, to seek reinvention within the boundaries of the country itself. It takes a similar kind of audacity to write Rocket Singh, where Kapoor plays a turbaned Punjabi salesman, not as comic relief or caricature, but as a nuanced, dignified, rebellious character. It's a portrayal that sharply contrasts with the kind of loud, over-the-top Punjabis YRF itself has often fed its audiences. And again, it takes real nerve to Shuddh Desi Romance which dares to question the very ideals that have long underpinned the YRF romantic universe: commitment, and compromise. Instead, he gives us characters who are sceptical of these values, who walk away from rituals and roles, who seek love without the burden of an institution. And to top it all, there is Chak De! India, a film that casts the country's greatest superstar, Khan, not in the image we know him for, but in the role of a man devoid of glamour, of romance, of charm. In its place, Sahni gives us sheer presence, restraint, and ache. To imagine Khan in such a part, and to have him deliver one of his finest performances, speaks to the daring imagination Sahni possesses: the ability to see not just what a star he is, but what he could become if handed a different mirror. One could go on and on, tracing the brilliance with which he constructs those small, magical moments that linger in our collective memory. One could go on writing about how he gives nuance and arc to characters often dismissed as peripheral, and how those very characters, over time, have come to define themselves in the cultural imagination, remembered not as types but as people. One could go on simply writing about his dialogue writing, his comic timing. His sensibility as a lyricist alone deserves its own essay, for he brings to language what few writers can: grace without excess, power without volume. And yet, there's a certain sadness in the silence. It has been over a decade since Sahni last wrote a film. A decade in which both cinema and the country itself have entered their most turbulent phase. Fractured, uncertain, polarised. This is a time when we need voices like his the most. We need Sahni, steadfast in conviction, unseduced by noise. We need him to return with stories of those tier-two cities that run the engine of the nation. We need him to once again give voice to those who question without fear, who dream without apology, and who live without waiting for permission.
Time of India
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Vikassheel Insaan Party chief Mukesh Sahni turns up heat on INDIA bloc
Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) chief Mukesh Sahni has stirred unease within the INDIA alliance in Bihar with his demand for 60 assembly seats and the deputy CM post, should the bloc come to power. Sahni, who has been attending coordination meetings of the alliance, claimed on Thursday that the Nishad community and related sub-castes constitute around 12% of Bihar's population and deserve representation accordingly. He reiterated his long-standing demand for SC status and a special reservation for the Nishad community. He also claimed that had VIP received more seats and the deputy CM post in the last assembly election, the RJD-led alliance would have won. His repeated assertions have unsettled allies, with several Congress and RJD leaders publicly stating that seat-sharing talks have yet to begin and Sahni should refrain from making unilateral claims. In 2020, Sahni dramatically quit the opposition alliance to join the NDA, winning 4 out of 11 seats contested. He left the NDA in 2022 after being removed as a minister in the state government. Live Events
Hindustan Times
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
INDIA bloc finalises seat-sharing in poll-bound Bihar; announcement pending
The Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) has finalised the seat-sharing arrangement 'amicably' for early seat-wise preparations in poll-bound Bihar, even as a formal announcement remains pending, people aware of the matter said on Thursday. The seats of the RJD and the Congress would come down to accommodate the Vikashshel Inshaan Party. (HT PHOTO) The people added constituents of the alliance have no issues with the formula, and the main party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress, are ready to contest fewer seats than in the 2020 election to give space to alliance partners. 'The focus of the alliance is on keeping the cohesiveness intact and winnability. Each seat was surveyed for unanimous decisions,' said a person on condition of anonymity. The three Left parties in the bloc could get more seats but less than what they wanted due to their better strike rate and proven track record, and potential to transfer votes. 'The seats of the RJD and the Congress would come down to accommodate the Vikashshel Inshaan Party (VIP) of Mukesh Sahni, which will get more seats than it had in 2020 as part of the [Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP-led] NDA [National Democratic Alliance],' said the person In 2020, the RJD emerged as the single largest party, winning 75 seats in the 243-member House. The Congress and the Left parties won 19 and 16 seats. VIP, then part of the NDA, bagged four seats, but all its legislators switched over to the BJP. The people cited above said Sahni is said to have bargained hard for a better deal, but the INDIA bloc has not yielded due to the potential of a close fight. Last time, there was a vote difference of just 0.3% between the NDA and the INDIA bloc. With 37.9% vote share, the NDA got 125 seats in 2020. The Opposition bloc got 110 seats with 37.6% vote share. Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation had the highest strike rate of 63.15%. It won 12 of the 19 seats, followed by RJD (75 of the 148 seats) with a strike rate of 52.08%. The Congress had the lowest strike rate of 27.15%, winning 19 of the 70 seats. Social analyst NK Choudhary said that the 2025 election could be a repeat of 2020. 'That is what will keep both the alliances on tenterhooks. The INDIA bloc knows the value of each vote after getting so near and yet so far last time. It is treading cautiously, but the fight again will be intense and close this time.' He said the NDA is understandably under pressure due to factors such as anti-incumbency and a fall in chief minister Nitish Kumar's clout. 'The fight will remain close, and that is the reason why the Sahni factor assumes significance despite not being a big one in Bihar.' RJD spokesman Mrityunjay Tiwari said the mood in the state had boosted the confidence of the party workers, who see a bright prospect. 'The mood is for change, and that will happen,' he said. He said preparations were underway for joint and vigorous campaigning focused on core issues and exposing the NDA's failures. A joint manifesto of the INDIA bloc was being given a final shape. It is expected to focus on welfare measures as well as fundamental issues such as employment generation, a check on migration, and corruption.
