P. BASANTH

Regional Editor, Mathrubhumi News

[Amul.coop @Amul_Coop]

Amul Topical: First footballer of Indian origin to be selected for a World Cup squad!

[Sushant Singh @SushantSin]

A simple thought experiment: If the two commercial ships attacked by the US military in International waters had Chinese crew instead of Indian nationals, would the US have targeted them? And how would have China responded?

Tells you all you need to know about Modi’s 12 years.

[Aunindyo Chakravarty @Aunindyo2023]

Many senior journalists have fallen into the trap of assuming that what is happening to the TMC has always happened in Bengal.

This is patently untrue.

Firstly, Congress leaders and workers stayed with the party throughout the long 34-year tenure of the Left Front.

After the Left Front lost in 2011, it remained largely intact as a political entity despite the campaign of terror unleashed on its cadre in rural Bengal. Even in 2014, the Left Front got a 30% vote-share — a larger number of marginal voters switched, but the core remained with the LF.

In fact, in the 2016 assembly elections the Left and Congress 'Mahajot' retained their aggregate vote share at 39% — roughly the same as what they had got in 2014, when they fought in opposing camps.

The violent ouster of the Left cadre from rural Bengal accelerated after this, peaking during the 2018 Panchayat elections. After that the Left's core base switched en masse to the BJP, instead of joining or backing Mamata Banerjee.

The Left's cadre needed a 'shelter' against the TMC's terror tactics in rural Bengal, and they found it in the BJP, which was in power at the centre.

Not only do voting patterns after 2016 confirm this, but researchers who have worked in rural Bengal have reported this shift as well.

What is happening now to the TMC is an entirely novel process. It is taking place because the TMC sustained itself around a personality cult of sorts. When the leader fell, everyone began deserting the ship.

There is no previous parallel to this in West Bengal's political history.

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

INTERESTING: If Nehru became PM only after the 1952 election as is now being claimed , then was Sardar Patel never really Deputy PM and India’s first Home Minister since he died in 1950?
The trouble with cherry-picking history is that it eventually contradicts itself.🙏

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

In April, MEA had summoned Iranian Ambassador to protest firing on ships with Indians on board in Hormuz...

[meetu jain @meetujain]

Morning gyan: Permission to travel is always given by the @PMOIndia. Judges of the #SupremeCourt and high courts concerned forward a request to Dept of Justice, Ministry of Law. A travel itinerary is prepared, the financial implications (TA/DA), official protocol etc worked out. The Foreign Travel Order is then forwarded to the PM who okays it.
Some 18 years ago, the Manmohan Singh govt had cracked the whip and read out the Code of Conduct to judges of the Supreme Court and high courts to curb the practice of judges going abroad for conferences and seminars even when the court was in session and a handful of judges were always away.
But even then, I don’t remember a judge going abroad to attend a private sports tournament!
In order to curb this practice, the MMS government’s law minister, Hansraj Bharadwaj, forwarded a story done by me for @CNNnews18 to the CJI and expressed his unhappiness at the “bad press”. The law ministry also came up with a fresh list of protocols following the story. The CJI then unhappily used my story to write to the high courts concerned sharing the government’s concerns. Some fresh rules were laid out.
It was decided that there would be proportional representation of judges accepting the invite and only one judge would represent the court. The invite would only be accepted if it was by the judiciary/government of the host country. The number of days was curtailed to what was considered necessary. Judges would travel by the shortest route possible.

The kill joy story that led to these seminal changes was me accessing through RTI the FTO of judges of the SCs and high courts from the dept of Justice since the #SupremeCourtifIndia was not under the RTI.

Then CJI KG Balakrishnan opposed my RTI tooth and nail, accused Hansraj Bharadwaj and then Home minister of conspiring with the media against the judiciary (untrue completely) and finally after nine months of my relentless pursuit, released the FTOs.

The travel details were an eye opener. The biggest “traveller” was ex CJI YK Sabharwal. He was out of the country for 45 days (the entire summer vacation) on tax payer expense, travelled to the US, went to Disneyland, visited his brother, went to Montreal via Vancouver (!!!) before going to Paris and back. The conferences in end May and mid July were at Montreal and Paris. (Why YKS went to Vancouver is another story. IYKYK).
KGB went for a conference to Pretoria, South Africa. His route was Kochi (three day layover at his house), then South Africa where he visited the famous Kruger National Park but skipped going to the Victoria Falls (the PMO was frowning) and some other touristy spots.
A few years later, I chased the story again. The RTI s came in a jiffy. Foreign travels had reduced to 10 per cent of what it used to be. Bharadwaj called me a killjoy but was secretly happy.
I can go on! There are hundreds of FTOs lying around which I got under RTI that gives you an idea how the tax payers money is spent.
But never have I heard of so many judges going for a private event, sponsored by the very companies they are sitting in judgement over.
@sardesairajdeep
@kthaparoffice
@maneeshchhibber
@sharmanagendar

[Rahul Gandhi @RahulGandhi]

PM Modi also personally supervised the NEET paper leak.

[PunsterX @PunsterX]

Ashok Shrivastav shouldn't be allowed to get away with an apology. He should be fired from his job.

Put yourself in Vedant's place.

You studied hard for your exam. You wrote your paper well. But CBSE goofed up with your paper and gave you low marks.

You are under tremendous stress. You take to social media to highlight the issue. But a DD News anchor labels you ‘Pakistani.’

And that anchor is paid with your father's tax money.

Now, imagine the trauma.

[Manisha Pande @MnshaP]

Please remember: The DD News anchor who’s calling your children Pakistani is paid by YOUR TAX MONEY. His salary is paid for by the public — and he actively goes against this public every night with his communal-bigoted-braindead nationalism.

https://t.co/69WKFKP4HQ

[Manu Joseph @manujosephsan]

The reason why the cockroach party has become so popular in a matter of days is not CIA but the suffocation of free expression in India. You cannot any longer be in mainstream entertainment or journalism, earn well and be free. India has become a Singapore minus the clean air. So any truly entertaining dissent (which activists normally are incapable of) becomes a huge relief for millions. This is not to say the Congress party was some beacon of freedom. I remember, under Congress rule, when Tavleen Singh came up with her saas-bahu memoirs she had kept the press launch very quiet for the fear of the Gandhis. Just that the Congress was such an inefficient organisation it was incompetent in administering even fear. But the BJP is good at this sort of a thing. Moral of the tweet is that if the BJP doesn't want real dissent it should allow some mainstream freedom of expression.

[Varun Choudhary @varunchoudhary2]

Dear CBSE Students,

Don’t worry and don’t stress. If you feel your OSM copies were wrongly checked or CBSE is not providing you transparency, DM me.

The portal is a mess and students are not being heard.

I am with you, will fight this legally and through other ways possible.

[Arvind Gunasekar @arvindgunasekar]

Isn’t CBI investigating alleged bank fraud cases against Reliance ADAG under the supervision of SC ?
Axis bank instead of filing the complaint with CBI has lodged it with Mumbai Police.

Something amiss here…

[Kunal Lalita Banjare @KunalBanjare17]

I protested against the RSS a few days back.

That made the Principal and his staff so rattled that they now want my 60+ year-old father, who lives in Chhattisgarh, to come to Delhi and meet them.

The college did not inform me before writing to my parents, nor did they have any conversation with me regarding any wrongdoing on my part.

This is clear-cut mental harassment and torture of my father and my family.

I lost my mother in January. The Principal knows this very well, yet now he is intimidating my only parent -my father.

They wrote the letter on 28th April, sent it on 13th May, and my father received it on 25th May.

I come from a Dalit family from a small village in Chhattisgarh, and I have faced several other discriminatory issues from this college administration as well.

I never knew that exercising my rights could create such a big problem for my family.

Despite all this, I am not intimidated. I do not fear the administration.

I am the elected President of the Shivaji College Students’ Union. If they are intimidating me, imagine the situation of ordinary students in Delhi University.

Babasaheb Ambedkar and his Constitution stand by me.

I will not bow down.

The RSS has destroyed academic institutions, and I will continue fighting against it.

Jai Hind. Jai Samvidhaan.

[Joshi JI @JoshiJi_]

One thing I noticed is that his answer sheet does not appear to have been evaluated through the on screen marking system and was instead checked manually only after he raised his complaint. This raises a serious possibility that his digitally evaluated answer sheet may have been wrongly assigned to another student.

This is far beyond a simple clerical error. It points toward massive mismanagement, possible data mix ups, and a completely compromised evaluation process where students’ futures are being handled with shocking carelessness behind closed doors.

[Deedy @deedydas]

A 19-year old broke into India's largest high school examination system of 2M+ students a year, the CBSE, and was able to view and CHANGE any students' marks.

He responsibly wrote to the team 3 months ago, and it took them 3 days to fix only one of the issues. Today, they took the entire website down.

This is a absolute embarrassment. The futures and lives of millions rests in the hands of the utterly incompetent. There is also no mass media reporting on the matter.

This topic is close to me because not only is this the education system I went through, but 12 years ago and silently for 5yrs since, I'd written about and reported a much less severe vulnerability allowing me to scrape these results too. More than a decade later, not much has changed.

This 19yo, Nisarga Adhikary, wrote a great piece outlining each vulnerability he reverse engineered:
- the master password leak
- the client-side 2fac / OTP validation workaround
- tokenless access to the entire internal app (dashboard, evaluator details, etc) setting dummy browser values
- changing any password without knowing the old one
- an IDOR vuln allowing you to act as any user and edit exam marks

For those interested in a beautiful study in security breaches, this is a must read (link below).

If there's any light at the end of the tunnel, it's that a 19yo who never went to college can do things 99% of top engineers couldn't figure out.

[nisarga @ni5arga]

This is really really bad, found another severe vulnerability in CBSE's OSM portal. Just sent another report to CERT-In.

[nisarga @ni5arga]

I had hacked CBSE's OSM (On-Screen Marking Portal) in February and had reported the vulnerabilities to CERT-In, but they were unable to patch most of them.

I've written a detailed blog post about it here: https://t.co/qyT23GkTEJ

[Abhishek Singhvi @DrAMSinghvi]

A student studies for years, writes an exam honestly &CBSE uploads someone else’s answer sheet under his roll number.
This is institutional negligence playing with the future of India’s youth.
Where is accountability of Education Minister? children deserve competence, nt excuses

[Tanmay Kashyap @TanmayKOfficial]

Respected Rahul Gandhi Ji,
@RahulGandhi @INCIndia

Sir, I'm a CBSE Class 12 student writing this with a broken heart and tears in my eyes

Two years of blood, sweat and sleepless nights... completely destroyed.

Your OSM system gave us blurry, unreadable answer sheets. The revaluation portal has been crashing since day one payments failing repeatedly, students overcharged up to ₹2,07,000 and 1 lakh due to glitches, hackers attacking the site, endless delays and useless extensions. Lakhs of us failed in multiple subjects despite our hard work.

I just lost my close friend to this pain. He couldn't survive the heartbreak. Many more students are having severe breakdowns and attempting suicide. Families are shattered. Our dreams of JEE, NEET and college admissions are finished.

We are not numbers. We are your children.

Sir, please speak up for us in Parliament and in the media. Raise this national crisis. Demand grace marks of 15-20 in ALL subjects this year for every student failed due to this OSM disaster. This will save 50-60% of us and give us a chance to live.

We beg you... don't let more lives be lost.

@cbseindia29 @EduMinOfIndia
@dpradhanbjp @PMOIndia
@narendramodi @cbseindia29

#CBSE2026 #GraceMarksForCBSE
#JusticeForCBSEStudents #Osm #Cbsestudents #OsmControversy #SaveCBSEStudents #Cbse

[Siddhant Srivastava @iamsidddhant]

Rajma chawal after such a hectic day a big thanks to all who supported us from Vedant and Siddhant and we are not Pakistani