While Brazil, South Africa, and even France condemned the most brazen violation of sovereignty in decades, India offered "deep concern" and a call for "dialogue"—without once naming the United States.
A 3.2% conviction rate, years of pre-trial imprisonment, and a legal architecture designed to deny bail—India's anti-terror law has become the BJP's favoured instrument for silencing dissent.
Police found 1.1% of attacks were communal. Indian media claimed genocide. The gap between these numbers tells the story of a propaganda machine serving the BJP's domestic politics at the expense of actual Bangladeshi Hindus.
How the Modi government's demonetisation, GST, and COVID lockdown didn't just damage small enterprises—they accelerated the greatest wealth transfer in independent India's history.
On rights-based legislation, tribal betrayals, the nuclear deal, and what statesmanship actually means—versus what we pretend it means.
On measurement politics, murdered enforcement officers, and watching Delhi's last green barrier disappear
On the day Parliament passed a bill named "peace," I thought of my father—who spent his life fighting for disarmament and died before the full weight of India's nuclear ambitions could crush the communities he sought to protect.
Cesses, surcharges, and a broken GST promise have systematically drained states while burdening the people the reforms were supposed to help.
A century after Ambedkar argued that the rupee's instability hurt India's peasants more than its merchants, we're still debating who pays when our currency loses value.
Where India's policies meet India's people. Comics about migration, welfare, work, and the distance between announcement and implementation.
On energy promises, discounted Russian barrels, the food vs. fuel trap, cars being killed by policy, and why the benefits of cheap oil never reach the pump—or the bus ticket.
The VB-G RAM G Bill doesn't reform MGNREGA—it guts it fiscally, institutionally, and morally. "125 days" is the headline. The fine print is a ₹55,000 crore heist.
How colonial exploitation, federalism's failures, and the political economy of domicile have kept hundreds of millions of Indians trapped between two states that claim them but serve neither.
On Caravan's RSS Project, the political economy of parallel infrastructure, and why the fight against Hindutva is inseparable from the fight for a working welfare state
On India's air pollution catastrophe: the year-round industrial poisoning we ignore, the farmers we scapegoat, and the billions we lose pretending it's someone else's problem
Four years after COVID, India's labour market tells a story the headline numbers refuse to tell
It was the middle of April 2021, the second wave of the pandemic had just about begun to rear its ugly head in India. I was looking forward to spending quiet time with my new-born and celebrating a decade of living with and loving my partner. Then everyone got CoVid (by everyone I mean everyone including my then 2 month old) and all hell broke loose. I remember the horror it became, the frantic search for medicines, the desperation for a hospital bed, leaving the city in disgust and then the three months of deaths, deaths and more deaths.
This last week I've been ill and so has much of my family. I gave up on trying to meet work commitments. For a while did little other than clean up my watsapp messages, contacts and messages. One of the really random messages I received was from SBI which said something about logging into "web--banking" (sic) and taking a pledge to celebrate vigilance awareness week. I found the message interesting, because, like many other things, the role of vigilance as an idea, is predicated on the idea that corruption per se is an evil that needs to go.
India’s GDP growth rate, even prior to the pandemic, was a five-point- someone. It really needs to grow. In order to grow, as we’ve discussed, we need less scared and more aspirational folks. People who demand are the ones who can stimulate industry to grow and invest. People need to find reasons to believe in the better.
Last week we agreed that India has an unemployment problem. This, we said, is because the economy has had structural issues. Afterall - all countries do. We seemed to be trotting along at a reasonable rate until recently - the illusion of growth and better incomes seems to have been at least partly true. Then things went downhill at a rapid pace.
