Some things to Reconsider

Couple of years ago, was have a discussion with Andhbhakt, who firmly believed that Prime Minister Modi was correcting the ills of the past, my position was vehemently opposite. During the argument, my question to this friend was, “what’s the difference between planning commission and NITI aayog.” This was rhetorical question because none of us had a clue, but the response was interesting. “This kind of hair splitting is for JNU kind of debates, not for working mortals like us.” In other words which is the standard belief among the community “Modi ji ne kiya hoga to soch samajh ke he keya hoga.” But I came to see, thanks largely to Eram Agha’s Caravan article and other public sources, that the differences are deep, structural, and troubling. The Planning Commission was born in 1950, just after the Constitution came into effect. It was the product of a consensus among leaders across party lines. President Rajendra Prasad spoke of raising living standards through structured planning...

 Donald Trump is back doing what he does best — throwing tantrums in prime time and calling it policy. His latest target? India. From parading deported Indian immigrants in chains — yes, actual chains, mid-flight — to snatching credit for ending Operation Sindoor, Trump’s message is simple: “I’m the boss of Vishwaguru.” He’s slapped tariffs on Indian goods, frowned upon Russian oil imports, and hiked H1B visa fees — a direct jab at the Indian tech class. And New Delhi’s response? Silence . The kind that pretends to be strength but smells suspiciously like fear. Spin doctors call it strategic restraint . The rest of us call it waiting for Trump’s next mood swing. When Trump wished Modi on his 75th birthday or extended his velvet glove , BJP’s online cheerleaders pounced on it like a Bollywood twist — “See! Friendship restored!” — until, of course, Trump’s next tweet arrived with his usual thunder. As the American columnist Ashley Tellis politely put it, India’s “extreme discipl...

R. Jagannathan in his article titled “Wooing billionaires & HNIs” published in Business Standard recently wrote that India needs “patient capital” or a booming plea for Indians and Indian Diaspora to invest in India. He asked, why do our wealthy continue to pack their Louis Vuitton luggage and say tata-bye-bye to Mother India? The answer isn’t rocket science. All it takes is a little honesty, a little introspection, and a little less finger-pointing. Take the case of Salman Khan. Eternal bachelor, permanent controversy machine. In January 2014, just before elections, there he was — flying kites with Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad. Salman smiled, called Modi a “good man,” but stopped short of endorsement. Clever man. At that time, his hit-and-run case was hanging like a noose. In 2015, BJP in power, a sessions court gave him five years in jail. By the end of that year, Bombay High Court acquitted him. Coincidence? God’s grace? Call it what you will. But Salman never converted into a...

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...

  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...

  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...

Not all transformative politicians are populists. Some, like Pratap Singh Kairon of Punjab, were pragmatic state-builders who resisted short-term populist temptations and thought institutionally. Kairon opposed the Punjabi Suba movement on linguistic and religious grounds, invested heavily in long-term electrification, and strengthened rural infrastructure. His fall owed more to the authoritarian style of his administration than to populism. Similarly, K. Kamaraj in Madras pioneered the mid-day meal scheme and educational expansion, embedding social policy in ways that outlived him. Internationally, Jacinda Ardern and Lee Kuan Yew exemplify leaders who did not merely ride waves of mass grievance but channelled state capacity to rebuild polities. But politics has a way of elevating not only such builders but also demagogues and provocateurs. If one studies populists across contexts, three things stand out. First, they rarely create grievances; they exploit those already fermenting b...

  Recently, Amit Shah, the honourable Home Minister, while addressing a book launch, declared: “In a few years people who speak in English will feel ashamed.” This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Shah has long shown his fondness for “One Nation, One Language” and his distaste for English. Read between the lines and the message is clear: India’s rulers want to dictate not just how we vote, but how we speak, eat, pray, and now, even how we play. Indian politicians have one hobby that beats all others: sermonising. Instead of governing—writing policy, enforcing contracts, ensuring safety—they prefer to instruct citizens. Governance becomes homily, laws become sermons. Take two excellent columns in Business Standard . Devangshu Dutta dissects India’s new Online Gaming Bill, 2025, calling it another example of politicians confusing governance with sermonising. The bill, with one sanctimonious sweep, outlaws fantasy sports, rummy, poker—any game where money is wagered in hope of winnin...

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/fiis-vs-diis-reversing-roles-in-india-s-equity-market-after-25-years-125081402018_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/economy/news/net-fdi-falls-to-40-million-in-may-2025-on-higher-outflows-125072301466_1.html Let’s stitch together three reports and an opinion piece from Business Standard all recent—and read the tea leaves. In 1992, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) dipped their toes into Indian equity with a modest investment of ₹13 crore. Domestic players (DIIs) then sat fat with ₹45,000 crore. Fast forward to 2014: the equations flipped. FIIs had ballooned to ₹6.6 trillion, while DIIs were crawling at ₹42,000 crore. In 2025, they’ve switched again: FIIs at ₹10 trillion, DIIs overtaking them at ₹14 trillion. Janak Raj of the Centre for Social and Economic Progress hails this as resilience. But let’s not dress up this as a symbol of “Atmanirbhar Bharat”. Capital has no hews of colour. Now to the horror story: net FD...

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/india-s-diplomacy-needs-to-move-from-demonstrative-style-to-hard-substance-125080501933_1.html Let’s begin with the obvious. R Jagannathan’s piece titled “India needs to up its diplomatic game” published in Business Standard dated Aug 6,2025 starts with the right note but soon meanders into a muddled defence of the very failures it gestures toward. The title implies urgency, even introspection. But the essay itself does little more than catalogue geopolitical anxieties while clinging to the same photo-op-driven framework that has defined Indian foreign policy for over a decade. To his credit, Jagannathan does briefly acknowledge the hollowness of Narendra Modi’s personal rapport-based diplomacy, stating that “personal rapport with global leaders is not a solid enough basis for conducting the kind of hard-nosed diplomacy that can deliver net gains for the country.” He nods at the performative spectacles of “Howdy Modi,” “Namaste...

 When the history of Indian diplomacy under Narendra Modi is eventually written, it may be remembered not for its strategic breakthroughs, but for its theatrical excesses, its silences in moments of crisis, and its worrying penchant for personalisation over institutional prudence. Modi’s foreign policy, by design, was never meant to be quiet or cautious. From the grand gestures of “Namaste Trump” to his surprise visits to Pakistan, it has been high on drama and low on deliverables. It has sought headlines, not long-term relationships. Unfortunately, in foreign affairs, style without substance often invites consequences. Let us begin closer home. In 2015, when a devastating earthquake struck Nepal, India was the first responder. This was an admirable and expected act by a regional power. However, what could have been a reaffirmation of India’s neighbourhood leadership quickly descended into a public relations disaster. Kathmandu’s citizens and civil society accused India of using ...