The horrific accident outside Bhandup railway station, where four commuters waiting patiently in a queue were killed when a BEST bus rammed into them, was a damning verdict on the state of Mumbai’s governance. Nine others were seriously injured while the city’s politicians were busy auditioning for power in the upcoming civic polls. The CCTV footage shows commuters being forced to wait in their queue, inches from moving traffic, because Mumbai has normalised danger as the pri

Eight months after the guns fell silent, Pakistan has done what India’s opposition and its attendant media ecosystem refused to do when it mattered: tell the truth. Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, has now publicly acknowledged that Indian strikes under Operation Sindoor hit the Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi, damaging a key military installation and injuring personnel. The admission, delivered with customary Pakistani bluster about intercepte

If Rahul Gandhi and the Congress he claims to lead wish to be taken seriously as a challenger to Narendra Modi and the BJP, they might start by choosing their battles better. Instead, the Congress has launched itself into a melodrama over nomenclature by mounting a ‘Save MNREGA’ campaign not because rural India is being short-changed, but because Mahatma Gandhi’s name has been removed from the title of a reworked employment law. In doing so, Gandhi and his party have managed

For decades, India’s financial capital has run its skies like a high-wire act. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, hemmed in by dense urban sprawl, has operated with effectively a single main runway while handling around 950 flights every 24 hours - among the highest traffic intensities anywhere in the world. Delays became routine, expansion appeared impossible, and the costs of congestion were borne quietly by passengers, airlines and the wider economy. That M

For decades, India’s space programme has been defined by method rather than muscle. However, ISRO’s LVM3, aptly dubbed ‘Baahubali,’ signalled a shift when it sent the 6.1-tonne BlueBird Block-2 satellite into low Earth orbit. This was the heaviest spacecraft ever launched from Indian soil, signalling the country’s industrial maturity, commercial confidence and geopolitical intent. Lift-off from Sriharikota was delayed by 90 seconds to avoid orbital debris, almost a reminder t

Mumbai likes to think of itself as different. Sea breezes, monsoon washouts and a supposedly lighter industrial footprint have long sustained the belief that air pollution is a north-Indian affliction and Delhi’s annual winter curse. The Bombay High Court has now punctured that complacency. In a stinging rebuke this week, it made clear that the city is not merely flirting with polluted air but sleepwalking towards a crisis of governance eerily familiar to the capital. The cou

Few landscapes in India are as old or as politically vulnerable as the Aravallis. Formed over a billion years ago, these weathered hills once acted as a geological spine across western India, arresting the march of the Thar Desert and nurturing groundwater, forests and settlements from Gujarat to Delhi. This month, they have become the latest battleground in India’s long war between conservation and development, after the Supreme Court accepted a new, government-backed defini

Local elections are often treated as parochial affairs dominated by drains, streetlights and personal loyalties. But in Maharashtra, they have transformed into something more consequential, being a referendum on power and organisation. The results of the latest round of municipal council and nagar panchayat elections suggest that the BJP-led Mahayuti has not merely consolidated its dominance since last year’s assembly triumph but has embedded it deep into the state’s politica

Indian cricket has rarely lacked confidence. Nor has it ever been short of money. What it has occasionally lacked, most recently and painfully at home, is humility. The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) decision to compel all centrally contracted players to turn up for at least two matches of the Vijay Hazare Trophy is an overdue admission that the country’s cricketing superstructure has grown detached from its foundations. The immediate provocation for the move

Parliament’s passage of the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill marks one of the most consequential shifts in India’s atomic-energy policy since the sector was placed firmly under state control more than six decades ago. By opening nuclear power generation to private companies and dismantling an awkward liability regime, the Narendra Modi-led government says it is finally unshackling a strategic industry weighed down b

In Maharashtra’s roiling politics, scandal is rarely novel. But what distinguishes the affair of NCP leader Manikrao Kokate is not merely its age (three decades old) but the brazenness of its facts and the slipperiness of the response. A serving cabinet minister in the ruling Mahayuti, convicted of cheating and forgery for fraudulently cornering housing meant for the poor, has resigned only after an arrest warrant was issued and the threat of disqualification became unavoidab

India’s primary opposition party, the Congress, has often struggled to look like a government-in-waiting. But rarely has it sounded so eager to undermine the very idea of the state. Former Maharashtra Chief Minister and veteran Congressman Prithviraj Chavan’s remarks on ‘Operation Sindoor’ - India’s military response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack - do precisely that. They are not just ill-judged but are a case study in strategic self-harm, delivered with the assuranc

After nearly three years of institutional drift, Maharashtra’s civic democracy has been roused from suspension. The State Election Commission’s announcement of polling dates for long-overdue local body elections set for January 15, with results the following day ends a hiatus that began in 2022. The election to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is less a routine municipal contest than a referendum on Maharashtra’s political future. No municipal institution elsewher

The Bondi Beach shooting in Sydney, Australia where fifteen people were killed at a Hanukkah gathering by a father and son later linked to Islamic State should have left no room for ambiguity. It an act of Islamist terrorism, not a policy puzzle. The facts were as plain as can be. Yet, Australia’s response, like that of much of the liberal West to similar attacks, immediately drifted towards safer abstractions and away from the ideology that drove the violence. Instead of add

The recent Salt Lake Stadium fiasco where iconic Argentine footballer Lionel Messi’s visit unravelled amid a welter of chaos and fan ire was yet another brazen display of the megalomania of the leadership of the ruling Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC). Messi’s Kolkata leg brought with him the promise of joy for a city that has long treated football as both religion and refuge. Legions of his fans paid exorbitant amounts - up to Rs. 14,000 - for the chance of a lif

The Maharashtra government’s decision to launch a revised Occupancy Certificate (OC) amnesty scheme is, on its face, a long-overdue step toward bringing order to Mumbai’s urban landscape. Announced by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde in the Legislative Assembly, the initiative aims to regularise nearly 20,000 buildings that have gone without OCs for years owing to minor deviations from their approved plans. More than 10 lakh residents - many of whom have paid double proper

Dissent is a democratic guardrail, meant to be used sparingly and to be summoned only when the state veers toward excess or when public interest demands a principled stand. But Congress scion and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has turned it into a reflex and a tiresome ritual. His latest dissenting note at a high-level selection meeting for the Central Information Commission (CIC) is the newest entry in a long catalogue of habitual obstruction. Gandhi’s latest salvo came d

Microsoft’s commitment of US$17.5 billion - its largest investment in Asia - to build AI and cloud infrastructure, hyperscale data centres and skilling programmes announced by its CEO Satya Nadella after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a signal of how global tech giants are recalibrating their priorities amid the noise of Trump’s harsh rhetoric against India. The first data centre is expected to go live by mid-2026, and 20 million Indians are slated for train

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to a special sitting of the Lok Sabha to mark 150 years of  Vande Mataram  predictably turned into an exercise in political combat with the Opposition, primarily the Congress. Few cultural artefacts in India carry as heavy a historical charge as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s hymn. To invoke it is to summon the romance of the freedom struggle, the fury of partition politics and the enduring anxieties of national identity in a single breath.

Few legal asymmetries in India expose the uneasy bargain between secularism, vote-bank politics, and gender justice as starkly as the continuing permissibility of polygamy for Muslim men. While Hindu, Christian, Sikh and Parsi men have been bound by monogamy for decades, Sunni Muslim personal law still allows up to four wives. For decades, India’s political class has treated Muslim polygamy as an awkward inheritance best left untouched. That uneasy settlement is now under str