Anuradha Rao

The Congress’ crisis is not merely electoral decline, but the slow exhaustion of imagination, organisation and ideological clarity. For a long time, my understanding of opposition was deeply personal. It began at the dining table. I had just entered college. We had moved to a new house. New friends, new influences, and conversations that stretched late into the evening. At home, the dining table became a miniature parliament. Strong Hindu voices surrounded me in conversations about the RSS....

The 2026 Assembly poll results have shown that India’s voters are shifting from familiarity to aspiration by rewarding those leaders and parties who promise a credible path to the future. Something significant has shifted in Indian politics, and we are still trying to explain it using the comfort of old ideas. For decades, we believed elections in India were won on the strength of grassroots connection. The party that knew the people best, that walked their streets, spoke their language, and...

Consider three children. All are six years old. All attend Class I classrooms in the same city. All are equally entitled, under Article 21A of the Constitution, to free and compulsory education. But that is where equality ends. The first child attends a government school. The teacher standing in front of the class was required, by law, to pass the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) - a benchmark designed to assess whether they understand how children learn, how classrooms function, and how...