Kiran D. Tare

Menaka Guruswamy’s likely entry into Parliament will make history, but it also exposes the curious theatre of liberalism in West Bengal’s ruling party. When India’s Parliament next convenes its Upper House, it is likely to witness a historic first. Menaka Guruswamy, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, is poised to become the country’s first openly lesbian Member of Parliament. Her path to the Rajya Sabha comes through nomination by the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), the...

As the United States and Israel unleash wide-scale strikes on Iran, India’s tradition of measured force offers an alternative to Western doctrines of overwhelming dominance. The reported killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei marks not merely the end of a man, but the possible unravelling of a system. For more than three decades, Iran’s Supreme Leader fused clerical authority with revolutionary militarism, anchoring a state whose reach extended from Beirut to the Bab el-Mandeb. His death, whether...

After Ajit Pawar’s death, Rohit Pawar moves swiftly to claim moral authority, and perhaps the future of a fractured dynasty. When the tragic plane crash near Baramati on January 28 killed Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, Ajit Pawar, the immediate focus was on loss. But in the days that followed, the attention has inevitably shifted to succession and the future of the Nationalist Congress Party, regardless of the factions. At the centre of it all stands Rohit Pawar, Ajit’s nephew and...