Some things to Reconsider

Consider two small but telling news items that appeared last week on Prime Minister Modi’s Birthday, both slipping into what I like to call the “News Shadow Region.” That’s the part of the newspaper where editors quietly park stories that are true but awkward —“minimum disclosure, maximum gains.” First, Vantara —a massive animal rescue and rehabilitation centre in Gujarat spearheaded by Anant Ambani. Officially, it’s an act of compassion by the Reliance Foundation. Unofficially, it looks like a billionaire’s private zoo masquerading as Noah’s Ark. Tigers, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, orangutans—even a mountain gorilla. They’ve got a better collection than most African reserves. Some of these animals were “rescued” from canned hunting farms. Wildlife enthusiasts will tell you a simple, grim fact: for every exotic animal that survives transport, two others die enroute. Conservation? More like shopping with casualties. The real miracle here isn’t the ark, though. It’s the judiciary....

History, if you care to look, is not some boring classroom lecture. It is a living, breathing reality that keeps reminding us: “Power never comes with a lifetime warranty.” But human beings—especially those who smell the intoxicating aroma of authority—refuse to believe it. Pick any date in Saddam Hussein’s bloody calendar and you’ll find a crisis hotter than the desert sun. The war against Iran bleeding Iraq dry. The financial debt mountain taller than his palaces. Israel casually bombed his nuclear toys. Kurds raising hell in the north. And later, Uncle Sam’s sanctions choking Iraq for nearly a decade. Yet Saddam’s moustache stayed upright and his statue taller than reason—until the Americans decided they’d had enough. South Africa offers another case. A system so brutally racist it shocked even its Western friends. From the sixties onwards, global opinion began to turn. Sports boycotts, diplomatic isolation. Yet apartheid, shameless and gasping, dragged on for decades until Mand...

The job of a Prime Minister is never an easy one. Some inherit a storm; others inherit calm seas with a steady wind. Jawaharlal Nehru got the raw end of the deal: a traumatised, partitioned land, millions uprooted, and the Cold War beginning to freeze the world in two hostile blocs. Lal Bahadur Shastri died a war time Prime Minister, and Indira Gandhi presided over a war-ravaged economy, staring across hostile borders at Pakistan and China while the superpowers treated India as a pawn. Morarji Desai stumbled into South Block after the Emergency, the West reeling from stagflation and his own coalition too weak to command authority. Rajiv Gandhi, with a brute majority in Parliament, was besieged by multiple insurgencies at home and a belligerent Zia-ul-Haq across the border. P.V. Narasimha Rao had to deal with the mother of all crises—the 1991 balance of payments collapse —just as the Soviet Union, India’s security blanket, disintegrated into history. Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who loo...

Who would have imagined that in India, the land of Gandhi ji’s simplest ideals, we would be witnessing a growth story so split that it resembles not a straight line rising but a sharply diverging “K”? One arm rockets upward, glittering with corporate gains and luxury whispers, while the other—silent, struggling—slides downward, borne by millions of workers, farmers, women in villages, and small shopkeepers. How ironic: the nation that owes its survival to unity now splinters economically into two disparate realities. It was in this context that political strategist Prashant Kishor, in a recent interview, made a striking remark. He declared his opposition to the Prime Minister’s promise of two new Amrit Bharat trains originating from Bihar. According to him, these trains were not designed to ease the lives of ordinary Biharis but to “facilitate the outward migration of inexpensive labour.” His observation is not merely cynical commentary; it points to a deeper malaise in the way India...

  Punjab. Yes, Punjab. The land that once champion of Green Revolution, that filled Delhi’s plates, that supplied grain for war and peace alike. Today? Reduced to standing in Delhi’s darbar with a begging bowl. And the darbar—majestic, distracted, full of hubris—barely glances. Punjab, it seems, is now the unwanted child of the Republic. A state tolerated, not embraced. Consider the floods. Villages drowned, crops ruined, forty-six lives lost, more than 1.5 lakh people affected. Punjab was gasping, but the Prime Minister? He was campaigning elsewhere, cameras clicking, slogans soaring. His Punjab visit came later, reluctantly, perfunctorily, as if someone in the “royal secretariat” pencilled it into the diary. Contrast this with Indira Gandhi. Whatever her motives, when bombs fell or borders bled, she rushed to Punjab. Yes, it was theatre, yes, it was for cameras—but Punjabis felt seen. Today, the subliminal message is crystal: Punjab’s pain is optional. The Guardian —a Londo...

  Some time ago, the residence of the Hero Group’s Munjal family was raided. The next morning, newspapers screamed that assets worth twenty-five crores had been confiscated. What assets? No one bothered to say. The press release was a haiku; the social-media choir turned it into an opera. The bhakts on social media cheered as if the government had unearthed a treasure chest in Gurgaon. To anyone with functioning spectacles, however, this was theatre, not triumph. Twenty-five crores in a billionaire’s home is what a village headman might call “a tidy sum”; for the Munjals, it is pocket change. To hail such a raid as a grand haul is like boasting of catching a whale when all you’ve netted is a sardine. This memory returns because of a recent article in Business Standard with the pompous title: Time to Stop Abusing India Inc. Its author, R. Jagannathan, sermonises at length—wagging his finger mainly at opposition politicians who allegedly malign Indian business houses, while spa...

  So, Javed Akhtar is a “selective atheist”? Really? That’s like accusing someone of being a “part-time vegetarian” because they eat paneer on weekdays and butter chicken at weddings. It’s a joke—except in our poor excuse for a public debate, people are deadly serious when they say such things. Let us begin with first principles. As Benedict Anderson reminded us, nations are “imagined communities.” They are held together not by dogma or theology but by stories, symbols, songs, and rituals. In India, this imagination was never purely Hindu, never purely Muslim, never purely secular either. It has always been a messy, colourful patchwork woven from Tagore’s verse, Gandhi’s politics, Ambedkar’s law, and yes, Bollywood’s lyrics. Now, in this fabric, why must you prove your secularism by mocking every religion equally? Who came up with that idiotic standard? Religion in India is lived in fragments, in uneven doses. Salman Rushdie once joked that being Muslim in Bombay simply meant n...

  The government and its cheerleaders are in high spirits again, beating drums for their favourite emperor’s latest “masterstroke.” This time, it’s the modest reduction in GST rates. TV Panels and Tweets buzzing with self-congratulatory chatter. Analysts calling it a historic, and even P. Chidambaram grudgingly called it a “reform”—with the delicious aftertaste of his caveat, “eight years late.” But let us pause. Let us ask the questions that Delhi’s television studios won’t: is tinkering with GST rates a reform? Does lowering a tax slab address the structural bottlenecks that suffocate Indian industry? Or is it another aspirin for a fever whose cause lies deeper in the bones of our political economy? The uncomfortable answer: this is not reform. This is a quick-fix, stitched together to meet political needs in Bihar and to respond to Trump’s tariffs across the ocean. Washington’s second wave of tariffs—punitive and linked to India’s oil flirtations with Russia—landed like a th...

  The transformation of the Indian state under Narendra Modi has often been narrated in terms of strong leadership, decisive governance, and an unrelenting emphasis on development. Development being a synonym for civil engineering projects, showcased in glossy WhatsApp forwards and jarring emotional endorsements by nobodies. Yet what has emerged over the past decade is less a model of sustainable development than what can be described as the “Contractor State”: a polity where monumental construction projects, executed with little public scrutiny, have replaced democratic debate as the primary mode of statecraft. In Modi’s vision, the nation’s destiny is equated with the building of imposing physical structures, even as institutional and ecological foundations are steadily weakened. The Central Vista redevelopment project and the construction of a new Parliament epitomize this logic. The official justification—that the old Parliament was structurally inadequate and technologica...