| The Supreme Court ruling on Chandigarh mayoral polls and electoral bonds have been cheered by many. Vir Sanghvi wrote it is not a viable long-term solution for us to look to the Supreme Court and expect it to function as the voice of the Opposition. As long as the court can protect and preserve the Constitution, none of us should ask for more.
Why journalists join politics is an age-old question in India’s power corridors. Sagarika Ghose who recently became a Rajya Sabha MP for TMC wrote an article saying “The era of non-alignment is over. The choices facing us are stark. While most of the mainstream media can’t ask these questions anymore, the political opposition can. Shoring up the political opposition thus becomes vital. It is only when the opposition lives that democracy can breathe and get oxygen.”
Jaitirath Rao finds it odd that Indian Leftists are supporting the farmers' protests. The protestors are landlords, own tractors and harvesters, and employ migrant workers for menial wages. Our coffee-drinking Leftists are aware, or should be aware, that Comrade Stalin described these landlord-farmers as “kulaks”. Are they cheering for a kulak agitation?
Questioning the morality of violence is not limited to modern times. You can find such questioning in antiquity as well, illustrated in crises of conscience. In his article, Patrick Olivelle highlighted three such crises exemplified by Ashoka, Yudhisthira, and Arjuna. The epic writers presented the examples of Yudhisthira and Arjuna as models for future rulers. The epic tells the kings—overcome your doubts and moral crises, do your duty, follow your dharma, be like Yudhisthira. The story carries the implicit advice: Don’t be like Ashoka.
I urge you to read these three fine stories from the Ground Reports team this week.
The controversial question of who runs revenue-rich Hindu temples returned to political slugfest this week. Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah just passed a Bill, which mandates the government to collect 10 per cent tax from temples with revenue over Rs 1 crore. Vandana Menon writes about a new temple freedom movement that has been bubbling in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. She travelled to the epicentre of this battle, Tamil Nadu.
Monami Gogoi travelled to Rajasthan and wrote this heartbreaking story about the loss of precious youthful years for the aspirants waiting for recruitment in government jobs, a process bedevilled with leaks, organised cheating, re-examinations, cancellations—be it for teaching positions or jobs as health officers, police constables, or forest guards.
India is changing. And Indians are reading more about this change — especially books on Modi, and Modi’s new India. This interest has spawned a new generation of books, and the market is flooded with books on every imaginable wrinkle of the Modi era, wrote Vandana Menon. And they are not just written by journalists and scholars. A new breed of writers is emerging – CEOs, tech gurus, RSS believers and self-published experts. These books are now a growing knowledge-production industry meant to mirror the political churn underway in India. The BJP has the numbers, what it now needs is narrative-setting and intellectual capture.
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