There is something faintly theatrical about Indian Chief Ministers flying to Davos to sign memoranda of understanding, as if Switzerland’s thin air confers a special aura of credibility. On the opening day of the World Economic Forum, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said his government had signed 19 MoUs worth a heady Rs. 14.5 lakh crore, promising 15 lakh jobs across sectors ranging from green energy to quantum computing. The numbers are grand. Yet back home, th

India’s federal compact was never meant to resemble street theatre. Yet that is precisely what unfolded in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where opening sessions of the Assemblies degenerated into petty skirmishes between Raj Bhavans and elected governments. Governors deserve scrutiny for overreach. But what played out on January 20 says as much about the studied belligerence of two state governments that have turned constitutional convention into a contact sport. Start with Tamil Nad

Road accidents in India have become almost quotidian. They are so frequent that they barely register beyond a statistic or a fleeting headline. Yet, even by these numbing standards the death of 27-year-old software engineer Yuvraj Mehta, who died last week after his car skidded in dense fog in Greater Noida stands apart. Mehta was driving home from work in Gurugram when his vehicle smashed through a low boundary and plunged into a deep, water-filled excavation pit on an adjoi

There are defeats, and then there are indictments. India’s 2–1 ODI series loss to New Zealand at home, sealed by a 41-run defeat in Indore, belongs firmly in the latter category.  The even stranger question is how are the Kiwis, of all teams, shattering India’s once-vaunted home turf invincibility for the second time in less than two years? New Zealand first inflicted a historic defeat when they whitewashed India 3–0 at home in 2024, a feat that was described as the first suc

A.R. Rahman has spent three decades persuading India and the world that music can transcend identity. Which is why his recent remarks to the BBC Asian Network land not merely as a sour note, but as a dangerous one. In saying that there was a communal bias against him while describing the film ‘Chhaava’ as “divisive” despite himself working on it, Rahman has said something highly corrosive. For an artist of his stature, such a lapse is not trivial. The interview, conducted by

For nearly six decades, Mumbai’s municipal politics revolved around a single surname. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), India’s richest civic body and the city’s real seat of power, was less an institution than a Thackeray fiefdom. That era now looks decisively over. With the BJP, in alliance with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena emerging dominant in the most keenly-contested civic body, the verdict is unmistakable: the Thackeray cousins’ reunion has failed, and with it

The death of Zubeen Garg, Assam’s most beloved musical son, was always destined to become more than a personal tragedy. In a region where celebrity, politics and grievance frequently blur, his drowning off Singapore’s Lazarus Island last September was swiftly recast as something more sinister in form of a murder plot and a betrayal. The Assam government’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) obliged the mood, filing a mammoth 12,000-page charge sheet accusing organisers, managers

After nearly three years of delay, Maharashtra’s eagerly-awaited civic polls including the key Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections are finally here. In Mumbai, the polls will see over 1.03 crore voters deciding the fate of 227 wards. Across Maharashtra, elections for 29 municipal corporations including the Pune (PMC) and Pimpri-Chinchwad (PCMC) civic bodies will be held in a single phase, with results declared the next day. The State Election Commission has ev

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle has long been treated as a model of quiet reliability. However, that reputation is now under strain after the PSLV-C62, carrying 16 satellites, experienced a deviation during its third stage of flight shortly after lifting off from Sriharikota. ISRO confirmed that the rocket did not proceed along its expected trajectory, though it has stopped short of declaring the mission a failure. In most launch vehicles, the third stage is where a mi

Few buildings in India carry as much historical sediment as the Somnath temple on Gujarat’s wind-scoured coast. It has been smashed, rebuilt, looted and restored so many times that it has become less a shrine than a ledger of the subcontinent’s civilisational fortunes Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the recent ‘Somnath Swabhiman Parv,’ captured that essence with unusual clarity. The ‘Shaurya Yatra’ - a ceremonial procession organised to honour those who laid down th

Few things corrode a democracy faster than a police force at war with itself. Maharashtra has now been offered a lurid glimpse of that pathology in the extraordinary feud between two of its most powerful former police chiefs, Rashmi Shukla and Sanjay Pandey, each accusing the other’s camp of bending the law into a political weapon. Five days before her retirement, Shukla, then Maharashtra’s director-general of police, has lobbed a political grenade into the home department. A

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policy latest tariff escalation, backing legislation that threatens tariffs of up to a staggering 500 per cent on countries buying Russian oil, is nothing but economic coercion dressed up as moral outrage with India emerging as its most exposed target. The proposed Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, championed by Senator Lindsey Graham and now greenlighted by Trump, is intended to cripple Moscow into halting the Ukraine war by punishing its cu

Silicon Valley likes to dress its creations in the language of freedom. Artificial intelligence, its apostles insist, is merely a mirror that reflects society’s appetites. India’s brusque 72-hour ultimatum to X over the misuse of its chatbot Grok now punctures that alibi. When a machine repeatedly enables the sexual humiliation of women, such mirrors no longer suffice. It is time to take responsibility. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s notice to X is a

Markets are adept at sniffing out power plays disguised as policy. Reliance Industries’ wobble this week, nearly 4 percent off its value which dragged the Nifty with I —was officially attributed to profit-taking, crude-sourcing jitters and global uncertainty. Beneath the market jargon lays a more corrosive force of American high-handedness with US President Donald Trump once again using oil as a cudgel and India as a convenient pressure point. Reliance makes for a revealing c

Few phrases in Indian politics are abused as casually as “murder of democracy.” Yet, Maharashtra’s Opposition, notably Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and his cousin Raj Thackeray’s MNS, has reached for precisely that charge after a rash of candidates from the ruling BJP–Shiv Sena Mahayuti alliance were declared elected unopposed in recent municipal elections in Thane district. Nearly half of all unopposed winners across the state come from one district and all belong to p

Even by South Asia’s febrile standards, Bangladesh’s decision to pull the plug on the Indian Premier League (IPL) is a breathtaking exhibition of diplomatic petulance that betrays Dhaka’s deepening insecurity as the country lurches into turmoil. The ostensible trigger for the ban the so-called ‘Mustafizur row.’ The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) asked for the release of Mustafizur Rahman from the Kolkata Knight Riders squad ahead of the 2026 IPL season owing to

For a country that treats cricket as civic religion and cinema as soft power, India periodically discovers that its biggest stars prefer the safety of ambiguity to the burdens of citizenship. Shah Rukh Khan, perhaps the most globally recognisable Indian alive, has once again demonstrated how that calculation works and why it corrodes public trust. Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), the IPL franchise Khan co-owns, recently spent Rs. 9.20 crore at auction to acquire Bangladeshi pacer

When disaster strikes in India, the world’s editorial writers know exactly what to say. Safety norms are lax. Enforcement is absent. Lives are cheap. The tone is brisk, the moral certainty absolute. But when a similar catastrophe unfolds in Switzerland - Europe’s byword for order, insurance and impeccable regulation – that script falters. The deaths of more than 45 people at a New Year’s party in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana should puncture the comforting illusion th

Good riddance is not a phrase one should reach for lightly. The rule of law depends, after all, on restraint and on the dull but civilised belief that courts, not pistols, settle accounts. Yet when Aslam Shabbir Shaikh, better known as Bunty Jahagirdar, was gunned down in broad daylight in Shrirampur this week, few in Maharashtra’s political and policing circles sounded genuinely shocked. Fewer still sounded mournful. The public, for one, certainly couldn’t care. Jahagirdar w

Municipal elections are supposed to be the humdrum mechanics of democracy. In Maharashtra, they have instead become a theatre of national politics, complete with intrigue, defections and alliances. As nominations closed for the long-delayed civic polls, both the ruling Mahayuti and the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) look less like coalitions than loose federations of convenience, stitched together by arithmetic and undone by ambition. The proximate cause of the chaos lies