Some things to Reconsider

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...

https://theprint.in/national-interest/zohran-mamdani-new-york-mayor-indian-socialism/2673153/  https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/zohran-mamdani-socialist-agenda-could-actually-spur-faster-growth-in-nyc-125062701427_1.html Shekhar Gupta’s recent column on Zohran Mamdani reads like a man trying to play neutral referee in a rigged match—raising one eyebrow at the Sanghi mob baying for blood, while slyly tossing them a whistle and pretending not to notice. With the other, it slips the ideological brass knuckles to the crowd already frothing at the mouth. Mamdani, Gupta suggests, is a well-meaning radical caught in a swirl of impractical dreams. But scratch past the polish of editorial polite prose and one finds the familiar discomfort of India’s populists and the extended coterie It’s not that Mamdani’s ideas are too radical—it’s that they are delivered from a platform that can’t be easily dismissed. A brown man, Muslim by heritage, representing a diverse district in ...