Good morning,
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to India ends with him calling PM Narendra Modi his “khaas dost”, two Pakistani terrorists killed in Jammu and Kashmir; “Jersey” movie review — here are the top stories from today’s edition The Big Story
Underlining that India and UK are together and confronting their “shared anxieties” on “autocratic coercion” around the world, visiting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “intervened several times” with Russian President Vladimir Putin “to ask him what on earth he thinks he is doing, and where he thinks this is going”. He said Indians want “peace” and the “Russians out (of Ukraine)”. He also announced the re-opening of the British embassy in Kyiv, which he had visited earlier this month.
Calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi his “khaas dost” (special friend), visiting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Friday that they have asked negotiators to reach an agreement on a Free Trade Agreement “by Diwali” this year. Stating that the two sides are working closely and making “good progress”, Modi hoped they will be able to conclude the pact by the end of this year. Only in the Express Hyderabad MP and All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi speaks to The Indian Express about recent incidents of communal violence across the country, the BJP, and Opposition parties such as the AAP and the Congress. “The BJP, wherever they are in power, there is no pretence left. They are openly claiming that they will be biased against the Muslim community,” he said. From the Front Page With just two days to go for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first official visit to Jammu & Kashmir since the state was split into two Union Territories in August 2019, police and security forces killed two suspected Pakistani terrorists “wearing suicide vests” during a nearly five-hour encounter on Friday near the Sunjwan military station in the Jammu region. An Assistant Sub-Inspector of CISF, identified as S P Patel, also died as the terrorists fired at a bus carrying security personnel. For over a decade, CBSE students have read these translated excerpts from two poems in Urdu by Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the “Religion, Communalism and Politics — Communalism, Secular State” section of NCERT’s Class 10 textbook “Democratic Politics II”. The verses have been excluded from CBSE’s 2022-23 academic curriculum, which was released on Thursday. As the second-year pre-university examinations started amid tight security, two students of the Government Pre-University (PU) Girls’ College in Udupi district, who had moved court over the hijab row, were stopped from taking their tests while wearing the head dress. Aliya Assadi and Resham walked out of their examination centre at Vidyodaya PU College after they were told they would have to remove the hijab if they wanted to sit for the test. 
☀️Monkeys beat the heat at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna) Must Read
Three teachers from the Jnana Jyothi English Medium School in Kalaburagi, which is owned by Divya Hagaragi, former president of the women’s unit of the BJP in Kalaburagi, and her husband Rajesh Hagaragi, were arrested by the CID in what is now known as the PSI recruitment scam. The teachers were among six invigilators at the school, which was a centre for a written examination to recruit 545 police sub-inspectors for Karnataka Police in October 2021. They came under the CID’s scanner after a few candidates did extraordinarily well.
From playing a key role in Modi’s PM campaign in 2014, to taking a political plunge four years later by joining the JD(U) and leaving it in a huff, to negotiating with the Congress for an entry now, Prashant Kishore has covered a long distance in Indian politics in the last eight years. But his hallmark through it all has been unpredictability, driven by ambition. Congress saga is a case in point; it took another twist on Thursday as a presentation he had reportedly made for the party last year where he suggested a non-Gandhi president was leaked. Ashutosh Varshney writes on the recent wave of communal violence across the country: “Conceptually speaking, when a state either explicitly favours a community or looks away when a particular community is hounded, intimidated and attacked, it is no longer a riot, but a pogrom. Unleashing bulldozers on any given community without proper process is not simply illegal, it also qualifies as the beginning of a pogrom if the community is ethnically, religiously or racially defined.” And Finally...
🎥 Shubhra Gupta reviews the Shahid-Kapoor starrer, ‘Jersey’: “Jersey, an official remake of the 2019 Telugu hit of the same name and by the same director, has all the elements of an inspirational sports drama…But the film is too stretched at 172 minutes, and the hero is too hangdog: ‘Jersey’ needed to be a little more rousing to keep us engaged all the way.”
🤫 Delhi Confidential: After a few months of uncertainty and confusion over the leadership in Madhya Pradesh, recent developments indicate that the central leadership is quite satisfied with the way CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s government functions. On Friday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who was in Bhopal for a day for official functions, heaped praised on the Chief Minister and the way the government has been implementing “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision”.
Until tomorrow,
Rounak Bagchi and Rahel Philipose  | 
