| | | Good morning! | | There’s a time for everything Late last Friday, after the Supreme Court uploaded its order in the Tamil Nadu vs Governor RN Ravi case, it emerged that the court hadn’t just stopped with mandating a timeline for governors to clear bills sent to it by the state legislature; it had mandated a similar timeline for Presidents to deal with bills referred to it by the governor . Ravi, of course, had been particularly obvious in his behaviour, making no effort to hide his motives (to obstruct). He had first sent the bills back , and after the state legislature had represented them, said he would refer them to the President. There are two ways to look at the court’s order. The first, as Kerala governor Rajendra Arlekar said in an interview to HT , as overreach by the court. But with governments taking the third way out — not a yes, not a no, but a “we’re sitting on it”, which was definitely not the intent of the Constitution — it is perhaps a good move by the court to define a timeline. To be sure, the Union government also sits on recommendations from the Supreme Court collegium and I think it is only a matter of time before the court issues an order on that issue too. Still, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that courts too — and this includes the Supreme Court too — sometimes sit on cases, usually inconvenient ones. Maybe in the spirit of its timeline-setting zeal, the apex court could define a timeline for itself too. That would only be fair. | | When in Tamil Nadu… Ravi’s activities in Tamil Nadu were likely a manifestation of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s enthusiasm in getting some kind of a toehold in the state. Until recently it appeared that the party would prefer to do this on its own — it broke up with its longtime ally, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 2023 — and its performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when it won no seats but ended up with a contested vote share just below 20% (which is nothing to be sniffed at) seemed to suggest that this journey was going well. But the temptation of unseating the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, currently in power, and being part of the government, if only as a junior partner in the coalition, appears to have been too alluring for the BJP. And so, last week, the party revived its alliance with the AIADMK, jettisoning its state chief K Annamalai, who has no friends in his party’s new partner. The mathematics makes sense, as does the cold logic that neither the BJP nor even the AIADMK is currently in a position to take on the DMK. Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that the only southern state where the BJP has been in power (on its own) is Karnataka, where its rise was facilitated by a longtime loyalist who happened to be from the right caste. | | A new attempt at old social engineering  For decades, Karnataka politics has worked under the assumption that the winning party needs the support of either the Lingayats or the Vokkaligas, the two dominant communities in the state. B Yeddyurappa, the BJP’s tallest leader in the state, and a former chief minister, is a Lingayat. In the 1970s, Devaraj Urs (Arasu) of the Congress managed to build a vote base from minorities, backward classes, and Dalits (he called it Ahinda, from the Kannada term for minorities, Alpasankhyataru, that for backward classes, Hindulidavaru, and Dalitaru) , and rode to power on a land-reform platform that targeted the dominant communities. Now, chief minister Siddaramaiah wants to revive the Ahinda base. That makes sense – the Lingayats have traditionally supported the BJP and, in recent years, the Vokkaligas have rallied behind the JD(S) -- except, as my colleagues Roshan Kishore and Nishant Ranjan pointed out, no party can come to power in Karnataka without the support of at least some of the Lingayats or Vokkaligas. The tool for such revival is a new reservation formula that expands quotas for backward classes (other than Lingayats and Vokkaligas) and Muslims. Underlying this move, however, as Kishore and Ranjan pointed out in a second analysis, is Karnataka’s broken economy – the Ahinda base has a very poor representation in salaried jobs, especially in the private sector. There’s more to Karnataka than Bengaluru. Outsiders assume the city’s prosperity reflects the state’s; and insiders from other parts of Karnataka are frustrated at not being part of Bengaluru’s gilded microeconomy. | | And the music played the band I listen to a lot of music a lot of time. And I listen to a lot of jam bands. It isn’t easy to make people understand what jam band music is, nor indeed why I like it. Jazzheads get it, though, especially those into Miles Davis. In a profile on jam band Phish — the band is in its early 40s now — in the latest issue of New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich does a great job of explaining the appeal of bands such as Phish: “There’s a particular moment that Phish fans wait for. It doesn’t happen at every show, and it’s difficult to describe without sounding as though you’ve been a whiff too cavalier with your dosing, but here goes: there is sometimes a brief yet transcendent stretch, occurring maybe ten or twelve or even twenty minutes into a jam, in which the band achieves a kind of otherworldly synchronicity, both internally and with its audience. This kind of moment, though mysterious, has been an essential and meaningful part of the band’s gestalt since the beginning. I felt it during the Mondegreen jam—a short but delightful vacation from my corporeal self.” Sure, ingesting certain substances helps, but it isn’t really required as I have discovered. The music is usually all that is needed. | | Friends and books The news story of the week, one that pretty much set the agenda for newsrooms across platforms was an innocuous report on a book by AS Dulat that first appeared in Hindustan Times. Allegations have flown hard and fast since; and people have sought to analyse why Dulat wrote what he did in The Chief Minister and the Spy, a book that set out to burnish Farooq Abdullah’s credentials as a nationalist, but failed to nuance what needed to be. It’s the reason Mint (when I used to work there) and HT have a lot of what we call to-be-sure grafs. Just two of these would have avoided the controversy. The first, where Dulat writes about the meeting the Abdullahs had with the Prime Minister shortly before the announcement of the abrogation of Article 370. Here’s how that would read: To be sure, it isn’t known what was discussed at the meeting, and Abdullah himself has since maintained that the abrogation took him by surprise. The second, where Dulat says Abdullah suggested to him that if New Delhi was insistent on abrogating 370, they (the Abdullahs) would have helped them do so in a less disruptive manner in the larger national interest. Here’s how that would read: To be sure, this is not to suggest that Abdullah supported the move — he has made it clear he does not — but that, pragmatist that he was, he would have reluctantly helped the Union government go ahead with it. Words clearly make and break not just books, but friendships. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? 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