Firstpost Editor's Picks: Sam Pitroda's 1984 riots remark, Atishi-Gambhir row, Student of the Year 2 review; today's must-read stories

Sam Pitroda's 1984 remark shows how easily Congress walked into Modi's Rajiv Gandhi trap Not for the first time has the BJP laid an elaborate trap and the Congress obliged by walking straight into it. It takes a special kind of insensitivity to show such arrogance while talking about a massacre in which so many Sikhs were killed, maimed, raped and displaced. And to think that these comments were made just two days before Haryana, Punjab and Delhi goes to polls — places dominated by voters who follow the Sikh faith — it is evident that the Congress is bent on political suicide. It took just hours for Pitroda’s “hua toh hua (so what?)" on 1984 riots to become a red-hot political issue and push Congress on to the back foot. **Atishi-Gambhir row: Bias won't swerve women leaders from their political destiny** From Urmila Matondkar’s rival calling her a bholi bhali ladki to a Samajwadi Party leader saying Jaya Prada would make nights rangeen in Rampur, all that these sentences convey is a blinding smirk and a cloud of befuddling contempt. The male politicians would like this cloud to make their women rivals and their voters feel small and useless. Most of all, they would like women to believe that the idea of a woman running for elections, a woman winning, a woman proposing policy and change are all figments of our juvenile imagination, like wanting endless ice cream. _Student of the Year 2_ movie review: Tiger's acting or plot clichés — what's the worst part of this film? SOTY 2 is centred around the very very middle class Rohan Sachdev (Tiger Shroff), star athlete of the low-brow Pishorilal Chamandas College, and his rivalry with the very very wealthy Manav Singh Randhawa (Aditya Seal) of the snooty Saint Teresa College not far away. To analyse SOTY 2 primarily on the basis of its gender apathy would be to take it too seriously though. What it ought to be judged on are its blandness, triteness and poor casting. Cliché is piled on cliché in this unoriginal screenplay. With spectre of ESL looming, Champions League season has served satisfying morsels of colour and drama It feels strange to celebrate the Champions League in the era of the “super club” when a dull group stage has come to be an inescapable routine. The super rich in European football tend to get their way. This season, Red Star Belgrade’s win over Liverpool was a pleasant surprise before Ajax’s stunning run to the semis. But even these developments are unlikely to herald a tectonic shift in the continent’s football. Instead, they might be the last reminders of a richer competition before a seemingly inevitable European Super League atrophies the pretence of fairness. Opium cultivation in Arunachal Pradesh: Tracing impact of tradition and trafficking The Mishmi Hills in Arunachal Pradesh — part of the eastern Himalayas in northeast India — have become notorious for illegal opium cultivation over the past two decades. Authorities have failed to take sufficient action with the periodic destruction of crops doing little to stem the thriving trade. This has led to the destruction of large amounts of forestland in a global biodiversity hotspot and major social problems in the remote region of India.