The recent claims made by Noreen Niazi, sister of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, completely expose Pakistan’s military myth-making and underline the widening gap between India’s capabilities and Islamabad’s illusions. In a widely circulated interview, Niazi challenged the official Pakistani account of the confrontation that followed the Pahalgam terror attack, claiming that the country’s military leadership concealed the true extent of India’s military advantage during Ope

The Maharashtra government’s decision to regulate school bus fares arrives couched in the language of safety, accountability and parental convenience. GPS tracking, CCTV access, panic buttons, digital attendance and fare oversight are all welcome measures. For years, parents have had little bargaining power against private school transport operators, who have often functioned in a regulatory grey zone. But buried beneath the promise of reform lies a more uncomfortable questio

The attempt by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) to turn activist Sonam Wangchuk into the next Anna Hazare has exposed how manufactured symbolism cannot compensate for the absence of genuine public outrage. What began as a grievance over the NEET paper leak, one of India’s gravest examination scandals in recent times, has drifted into an exercise in political pageantry, where the cause has been eclipsed by its chosen mascots. Wangchuk’s indefinite hunger strike was plainly mea

The murder of 24-year-old Kirandeep Kaur in west London is, first and foremost, a personal tragedy. A young Sikh woman from Punjab, who had moved to Britain in search of opportunity, was killed only weeks after giving birth. But her death has unfolded against a darker backdrop. Britain is witnessing an unsettling rise in anti-Sikh hostility, fuelled by the toxic convergence of identity politics, social media outrage and far-right mobilisation. A survey by the Sikh Network fou

The death of 13 Indians and the disappearance of three others in the unabating US-Iran conflict should end any illusion that this is merely another distant geopolitical crisis. For India, West Asia is not an abstract theatre of great-power rivalry but home to nearly nine million Indian expatriates. Every missile fired across the Strait of Hormuz carries the potential to claim Indian lives. While the Ministry of External Affairs has expressed concern, called for uninterrupted

The unravelling of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana was always a matter of when, not if. Announced with theatrical flourish ahead of the 2024 Assembly election by the ruling Mahayuti coalition, the scheme promised Rs. 1,500 a month to women across the state. It became the Mahayuti government’s showpiece welfare programme and, by all accounts, a decisive political instrument that helped propel the ruling alliance to a comfortable victory. Less than two years later, th

Indian cricket has lived with an odd imbalance for decades. It has always been the men’s team that has commanded the money, the headlines and the expectations while women cricketers were expected merely to improve. Now, with their phenomenal Test win over England at Lord’s, it is the women who have reminded India what Test cricket looks like when played with ambition, discipline and nerve. The Indian women overwhelmed the English side by inflicting a crushing 270-run victory,

Pimpri-Chinchwad is fond of advertising itself as a model city. Its gleaming roads, industrial estates and ambitious infrastructure projects have helped make the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) one of India’s wealthiest civic bodies. The shocking accident in which eight labourers died after a massive garbage heap collapsed onto the administrative building of the Waste-to-Energy plant at Moshi, exposes the rot beneath PCMC’s outwardly prosperous edifice. The cont

The decision by censors to withhold the Diljit Dosanjh-starrer Satluj from Indian audiences scarcely forty-eight hours after its release has elevated the film into a political cause. The controversy is now about how India chooses to remember one of the bloodiest chapters in its post-Independence history, and whether memory can survive when it becomes selective. The film chronicles the work of Jaswant Singh Khalra (played by Indian-American singer Dosanjh), the activist who in

The collapse of the United States-Iran ceasefire in less than a month is a stark reminder that peace in West Asia has become a remarkably perishable commodity. The ink on the ceasefire with Iran had scarcely dried before missiles are once again crossing the Gulf as oil tankers flee the Strait of Hormuz. Donald Trump’s triumphalist declaration last month that Iran had accepted an “unconditional surrender” has aged with astonishing speed. The latest cycle of escalation was almo

India’s shocking T20 series defeat to Ireland is a warning that the country’s greatest cricketing opponent is no longer the team standing across the pitch, but the complacency festering within its own dressing room. A team that commands the richest cricket board, supposedly the deepest talent pool and the most lavish ecosystem in the sport has contrived to lose a T20 series to a nation where cricket remains a minority pursuit. That this is Shreyas Iyer’s fifth match as T20 ca

The substantial showers over Maharashtra this year have predictably demonstrated that it is not the skies but the government that has failed the state. The intense downpour once again exposed the frailty of the infrastructure that the ruling establishment has been celebrating. From Mumbai’s paralysed roads to the shocking deaths in open manholes sans guardrails, to the collapse of transport links between Mumbai and Pune, the rains have held up an unforgiving mirror to officia

For over two centuries, Mumbai’s Asiatic Society, founded in 1804, has stood as one of India's greatest repositories of learning. It has been a sanctuary of rare manuscripts and civilisational memory. Yet, its recent election will be remembered less for a change of office-bearers than for the collapse of an intellectual order that had come to mistake custodianship for ownership. The sweeping victory of Vinay Sahasrabuddhe’s Asiatic Tomorrow panel is not merely an institutiona

Every monsoon, Mumbai wages war against the rain. Too often, however, it is the city’s own administration that proves deadlier than the weather. The death of a 60-year-old man, swallowed by an uncovered manhole during civic maintenance work, was not an accident but the predictable consequence of administrative negligence so gross that it deserves to be treated as culpable homicide. A man walking on a public road vanished into a civic death trap created by the very agency en

Justice delayed is often described as justice denied. But for the Kashmiri Pandits, it has frequently been forgotten. The decision to charge separatist leader Yasin Malik as the alleged principal conspirator in the abduction, gang rape and murder of Kashmiri Hindu nurse Sarla Bhat comes after thirty-six long years. It is an indictment of the Indian state that allowed one of the most horrific crimes of the Kashmir insurgency to languish in legal limbo. Sarla Bhat was only twen

The flash floods tearing through Arunachal Pradesh and adjoining Assam were an unsettling demonstration of how climate change, ecological degradation and unwise development are converging to create disasters of startling speed and scale. The Arunachal Pradesh floods are a glimpse of a broader environmental future in which extreme weather collides with weakened ecosystems to magnify human and economic losses. Strangely, much of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have experienced a ra

The rape and murder of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl in Maharashtra’s Nasrapur village was one of those crimes that momentarily dissolves the distinction between legal outrage and moral revulsion. Such acts seem to defy language as much as law. The Pune Special POCSO Court deserves commendation for demonstrating that justice need not be paralysed by delay. Its decision to sentence the convicted perpetrator, Bhimrao Kamble, to death within two months of the crime was nota

The Muharram plot uncovered by Mumbai Police deserves to rank among the gravest terror conspiracies thwarted in recent years. Investigators say that Fayyaz Premji, a Pune-based businessman, spent nearly two weeks in a Dongri hotel assembling thousands of capsules containing zinc phosphide, a highly toxic rodenticide, before allegedly distributing them to Shia mourners during Muharram as purported painkillers. Nearly 15,000 poisoned capsules were reportedly recovered from his

The Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) paper leak could hardly have come at a worse time for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the state and the centre. Coming barely weeks after the political fallout over the NEET controversy and amid lingering questions over the management of public examinations, another test has been derailed by allegations that its question paper was compromised before candidates entered the examination hall. The incident reinforces an increa

The proposed India-US trade agreement has now become a test of whether India can convert a turbulent global trading order into a lasting strategic and economic advantage. For decades, trade negotiations largely revolved around a familiar arithmetic of reducing tariffs and expanding market access. That comfortable world has vanished. The United States led by Donald Trump increasingly treats trade as an instrument of geopolitical leverage. As a result, Commerce Minister Piyush