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Delimitation as envisaged by this government threatens not just the federal principle, but democracy itself.

30-06-202630 STORIES

In this issue

Congress rally

Failing the federation

A delimitation exercise calibrated to inter-censal population growth would produce a materially asymmetric redistribution of parliamentary representation.

Ajay K. Singh,Amisha Thakur,Khalid Ansari,Nalin Verma

Delimitation cover

Editor’s note

Rethinking representation

While democracy affirms the equal worth of every citizen, federalism affirms the equal dignity of every State. A wise Constitution must balance the two.

K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty

Yogendra Yadav

FRONTLINE CONVERSATIONS

If Assam, J&K-style delimitation becomes the norm, you can say goodbye to electoral democracy: Yogendra Yadav

Yadav says the opposition’s fear is absolutely justified. The real issue, he says, lies with the second and third parts of the delimitation exercise: the drawing of constituency boundaries.

Inside a constitutional ‘black box’

Insulating delimitation from political interference does not mean excluding it entirely from legislative and judicial scrutiny.

K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty

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From the Sidelines

Can Abhijeet Dipke and CJP survive the real world?

The CJP’s viral rise tapped into public anger over jobs, education and institutions. Real politics comes with permissions, pressure and scrutiny. The next few months may show what kind of movement this really is.

Ashok Dhawale.JPG

Response to fuel shortage is reactive, cosmetic: Ashok Dhawale

The All India Kisan Sabha president says large corporations receive concessions and protection, while peasants are asked to reduce fertilizer use and accept lower consumption.

T.K. Rajalakshmi

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The Bhojshala loophole

The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s ruling on the Dhar complex shows how the Places of Worship Act can be circumvented through protected-monument and writ-jurisdiction routes.

At Hakimpur checkpost

CRACKDOWN ON IMMIGRANTS

Bengal’s holding centres trigger an exodus

The BJP government’s decision to create holding centres for undocumented migrants has triggered a fresh exodus of Bangladeshi settlers from West Bengal.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay

What awaits Chief Minister Vijay

The TVK leader must persevere with DMK leader Stalin’s vision for the State, apart from continuing to resist the saffron forces.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

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YOUTH AND POLITICS

A judge’s jibe, a ‘parody party’, and a generation’s anger

The Cockroach Janta Party began as a joke on social media, but its rise has exposed how little India’s political class understands its young.

Naveen Patnaik with Narendra Modi

CRISIS OF REGIONAL PARTIES

The ‘who next’ dilemma of JD(U) and BJD

Both parties have had different political trajectories in recent years, but both now face the same challenge: finding a worthy successor to Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik.

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Economic perspectives

The mega AI bubble

A frenzied scramble for a stake in AI has set off a mega IPO boom, with abundant liquidity and hype driving valuations to extraordinary levels. As prices begin to fall, investor capital and pension savings are increasingly at risk.

C.P. Chandrasekhar

Xi, Trump and India’s narrowing strategic space

The Beijing summit showed that American primacy in shaping the terms of the US-China relationship is over. China’s growing strategic confidence also leaves it with less incentive to offer India concessions on unresolved issues.

Ashok K. Kantha

Aerial view of Thottappally coast

SAND MINING in KERALA

Black sand, broken shores

Residents of Thottappally in Kerala’s Alappuzha district have spent years resisting large-scale sand mining that they say has accelerated coastal erosion, damaged fragile ecosystems, and threatened livelihoods.

GREAT NICOBAR PROJECT

Great Nicobar’s blueprint for ‘development at any cost’

The NGT’s acceptance of the government’s arguments in favour of the Great Nicobar Island project at face value is troubling because it shields the Centre from accountability and discourages critical scrutiny of a project of far-reaching consequences.

Srijani Datta,Nikhil Kothakota

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The Ethical Life

Undone by unthinking

In a world where strong forces systematically devalue our inner lives, what is sorely needed is the recovery of the conditions under which self-reflection and thinking become possible.

Rajeev Bhargava

Low pay has a long political memory

The May 1926 General Strike in the UK and the May 1974 Railway strike in India both grew from low pay and harsh working conditions into wider working-class upheavals. India’s latest strikes may now foreshadow deeper economic and political unrest.

Pritam Singh,Bill MacKeith

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The secular safe space

The secular Muslim intellectual is brilliance deployed in someone else’s argument.

Amin Jaffer

It’s a project that touches you: Amin Jaffer

The curator of the India pavilion at Venice Biennale on why the artworks are meant to evoke thoughts of home as a space, physical, or emotional.

Counter culture

Beyond the film festival

We need a film-viewing culture that is both circumspect and not self-congratulatory, that builds a language of critique alongside that of taste.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Reading with cherry blossom trees

Marketable magic

The proliferation of Japanese cosycore novels tells us as much about our wounded times as about the timeless consolations of literature.

Jaideep Unudurti

Personal narrative

Her name was Pankajam

Recovering her grandmother’s voice from her unpublished writings, Kalpana Karunakaran reminds us that lives constrained within domestic spaces are no less complex, and of no less consequence.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

Literary memoirs

He said, she said

The memoirs of an iconic Hindi writer couple expose an unequal partnership: Rajendra Yadav’s text glorifies his creative freedom, while Mannu Bhandari’s counter-narrative lays bare the hidden labour behind it.

Tagore’s living inheritance

Uma Das Gupta’s scholarly history of Santiniketan traces its evolution into a “centre for the meeting of East and West”, a vital model in an era of polarised nationalism.

Lawrence Surendra

Meeting on a bridge

International BOOKER PRIZE

Bridges and bean buns

The winner of the Booker International is a complex but masterfully told story about colonial dynamics, literary creation, and the limits of translation.

Mridula Vijayarangakumar

Musalman

A hero of our time

The satire in Falah Faisal’s comics is not rabid. Rather, it is friendly, jokey, of the kind that makes a strong cup of tea stronger.

Anusua Mukherjee

New books on the shelves

A book of plays on pioneering Indian physicists, a collection of essays on what shaped Indian ideas of freedom, and much more.

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Victoria’s palam

The British constructed an arched bridge across the Bharathapuzha river in Palakkad in 1883. More than 100 years later, I was enjoying the spectacular views from the bridge during my morning walks there.

‘The Dystopian Times’ by Appupen

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