The Federal

It is welcome that the government has decided to repeal the three controversial farm laws. It is a definite political setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and reflects the BJP’s political vulnerability in Uttar Pradesh. It is a victory for democracy and agitational politics as a corrective tool when Parliament ceases to be a forum of informed decision-making and stands transformed into a rubber stamp for the will of a partisan majority in thrall to a single, charismatic leader.

It’s debatable if AB de Villiers is as adored and revered in the city of his birth, Pretoria, as his adopted home, in India. Actually, strike that. As much as the people of Pretoria might love him, the South African genius hasn’t received as much approbation and a sense of belonging as he has in Bengaluru, the city that would gladly have handed ...

It is not uncommon for political tongues to start wagging in Washington DC, not just within the media but among political operatives of Democrats and Republicans as well not to forget the hacks of various hues. But what is worrisome this time to Democrats is that the “story” of US Vice-President Kamala Harris will simply not wither away from mai...

Popularly known as a ‘tragedy’, the wagon massacre of Malabar, under the supervision of British imperial officials marks its centenary today. This massacre was an imperial reaction to the massive resistance movement in the southern region of the British Malabar in the early 1920s. The resistance was accrued out by peasant revolutionaries, majori...

November 26 is the day the Farmers' Agitation at Delhi borders against the Centre’s three controversial farm laws in India would have completed one year. The farmers had announced their determination to intensify the protests. But before they could do that, the Centre announced that it would repeal the laws. November 26 is also the day on which ...

On November 12, acting on an alleged “tip-off”, the Hyderabad police raided a printing press, Navya Printers, which was publishing a book on the top Maoist leader and Central Committee member Akkiraju Hargopal alias Ramakrishna alias RK. The Maoist leader had died recently in October of natural causes. An FIR was filed against the owner of the printing press, A Ramakrishna Reddy and his wife Sandhya Rani, which is registered at the Amberpet Police Station in Hyderabad under Section 8(2) of Telangana State Public Security Act, 1992.

The Glasgow Climate Summit was neither a cop-out nor a grand success that has produced an action plan for halting, leave alone reversing, global warming. It is a moderate success, as grand political compromises go, and global agreements among nations at various stages of prosperity and battling different kinds of development challenges are all poli...

National Press day should be an occasion to contemplate rather than celebrate; we ought to be alarmed about media's pressing problems

National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval’s recent broadside against civil society and his contention that its members are naive enough to be “subverted, suborned, divided, manipulated to hurt the interests of a nation”, marks the first time that an important non-politician person in India’s security establishment has lent support to the sangh parivar’s political onslaught on civil society organisations and individuals associated with these institutions.

Three months since the Taliban dramatically seized power in Kabul, the world appears to have taken the putsch in its stride and moved on. News about Afghanistan has receded into the inside pages of leading newspapers and out of sight of TV networks and in online media. While the rest of the world can afford to carry on with other business like COP...

This was no ‘Carlos Brathwaite, remember the name’ stunning sting-in-the-tail kind of battle of 2016. This wasn’t a match where fortunes yo-yoed crazily before Lady Luck settled gently on one side. This was no edge-of-the-seat thriller, not a classic, not one for the ages if you are the kind that enjoys devouring nails as the denouement looms. A...

One of the lead headlines in Saturday’s newspapers in Delhi is: ‘Army blinks after SC warns it of contempt’ (Hindustan Times). The introduction quotes the Supreme Court (SC): ‘The army may be supreme in its own authority, but the constitutional court is supreme in its own jurisdiction.’ The issue here being that the army, despite a favourable SC ruling, denied a permanent commission to all (female) short commission officers who met the service conditions. The army then blinked, which augers well for women soldiers.

Joju George, an actor hitting all the right notes, appears to have found himself on a befuddling character arc in Kerala’s political theatre. He has irked the Indian National Congress, the state’s primary opposition party, by questioning its road blockades against the rise in fuel prices. The Congress’ response also strikes you as unfamiliar role-p...

Giving retail investors direct access to buying and selling government bonds sounds radical. But it serves no practical purpose, either for retail investors or for widening or deepening the debt market

A prestigious institution in Washington DC is on the boil for the last four weeks; and students do not seem to be bothered that they have not showered, sitting in protest least concerned if authorities have threatened to throw them out of the school. 

By 2015, England’s white-ball cricket was in shambles. The country that had given the world the sport became everybody’s favourite whipping boys. When they were good, it was just about but when they were bad, they were horrendously so. England’s problems stemmed from their safety-first approach. A profusion of Test specialists, among them skippe...

The concerted campaign by Hindu right-wing activists against Friday Namaz in public places in Gurugram, its tacit endorsement by state and district officials and institutions, and the recent so-very-coincident provocative speech by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Uttarakhand, are aimed at ‘invisibilisation’ of Muslims. The intention is to force th...

'Jai Bhim' ironically addresses the class that is guilty of exploitation of the underprivileged, and the praises they shower on the movie is an expression of their latent guilt. To repeat: they want to be ‘seen’ to be on the right side of history. Throughout this piece, I emphasise words like ‘appear', ‘look,’ ‘seen’, because as a society we are in a phase of representation; representation of ourselves to each other and to ourselves as good people.

Where was this India in the first two matches? Why was this fearlessness conspicuous by its absence? What forced them to be diffident and withdrawn against Pakistan and New Zealand? These are questions Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri would normally have been asking of themselves. The captain and the head coach are serving out their notice period, s...

Between now and the 2024 presidential elections, Joseph Biden and the Democrats cannot pass off every political hammering as something only to be expected in an “off year”. In the aftermath of the drubbing in Virginia where the seasoned Terry McAuliffe was pushed aside by Republicans who had been sitting on the sidelines for about a decade, the ...