Prasad Dixit

While global leaders preach sustainability with near-religious fervour, the green promise risks collapsing into empty ritual without incentives or a moral framework. Few ideas command such effortless global consensus as sustainability. From the annual pilgrimage to Davos to gatherings of the G20, BRICS, ASEAN, SAARC or the SCO, no conclave of world leaders now ends without solemn invocations of climate change and its looming toll on health, biodiversity, agriculture and growth. Targets are...

India’s colonial hangover cannot be vanquished until its democratic institutions relearn how to govern themselves. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent invocation of the need to defeat the “Macaulay mindset” has stirred a familiar fault line in India’s public life. Almost at once, the debate collapsed into its usual trenches: the dominance of English, the legacy of colonial education and the supposed invasion of foreign culture. These are easy targets, and comforting ones. They suggest that...

India’s electorate is maturing faster than its political class, leaving parties trapped in outdated assumptions about caste, freebies and grievance. Are political parties keeping pace with the citizens they seek to woo? As the dust settles after the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) emphatic win in Bihar, the familiar ritual of parties, pundits and psephologists rummaging through their usual toolkit of explanations has begun. The familiar debates and arguments of pro-incumbency or...