| There’s a difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and Vir Sanghvi untangled the two using Uttarakhand's new live-in rules. While an authoritarian society seeks to minimise or punish dissent, a totalitarian society decides how people will live, what they will eat, how they will love. Each time we allow the state to take control of our lives, we are following the path of Mao Zedong, Mullah Omar. It always starts small, but never stays that way.
Who is the middle class today? They’re no longer the fat middle, but a thin crust in Indian society, wrote Yogendra Yadav in his analysis of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra and the decision to launch it from the Northeast. In India, politics of the margins is mainstream politics. For Gandhi, it was a moral-ideological issue. You cannot do a nyay yatra and skip the one state that is suffering the worst form of political injustice.
But with elections just around the corner, political analysts find fault with many things about Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. The growing consensus is that the Congress is either blissfully unaware of how the BJP is setting up the contours of the 2024 poll battle or has chosen to live to fight another day—in 2029 or later. DK Singh listed seven things Gandhi can do for the Congress party’s revival, but won’t.
The Narendra Modi government’s decision to confer the Bharat Ratna on LK Advani and Karpoori Thakur in the same week is a strong political statement ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election. It is an act of political iconography, which no Indian political formation has ever tried before, wrote Dilip Mandal. He called this move a synthesis of Mandir and Mandal politics.
Home Minister Amit Shah’s recent announcement regarding the fencing of the 1,643-km Myanmar–India border has stirred up considerable debate. General MM Naravane (Retd) argued that the government should reconsider. Border fencing is perhaps justified for Pakistan and Bangladesh. But on the Myanmar border, where the population is sparse and the threat of terrorism low, the proposal should be revisited.
An ideological conflict has consumed some of the more elite colleges in the United States since the 7 October Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. Reporting from New York City, Samar Khurshid found that it is entangled with the raging cultural war in the United States, where a larger political onslaught has been mounted against ‘woke’ ideology.
Vandana Menon travelled to Ayodhya, which symbolises more than just the fulfilment of a centuries-old Hindu dream. It’s a lighthouse for those Hindus who feel that they have been wronged and have carried a sense of persecution for years, even centuries. This ‘self-pitying’ Hindu is a powerful voting bloc now.
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