UNESCO’s inscription of India’s Deepavali festival into the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity is far more than a symbolic pat on the back. It is a global affirmation that one of India’s oldest and most unifying civilisational practices stands tall among humanity’s living treasures. And the timing could not have been…

Two crises erupting within days — Indigo’s spectacular operational collapse and Goa’s horrifying Birth Club inferno — have placed the 12-year-old Narendra Modi–led NDA government in an unusual position: on the defensive, not before a roaring Opposition in Parliament, but before an unforgiving and unusually united media. For once, the criticism didn’t come from political…

The Modi government today faces a crisis not born of opposition attacks, but of its own unwillingness to confront glaring failures in civil aviation oversight. The continuing Indigo fiasco — from its defiance of newly mandated winter norms to the DGCA’s baffling indulgence — has exposed a disturbing pattern: a regulator asleep at the controls,…

For nearly eight decades, India’s cultural core has been chipped away not by foreign powers, but by the very political establishment that claimed to defend the Republic. The Congress-led governments, since Independence, presided over the systematic dilution of India’s civilisational narrative — rewriting, pruning, and often amputating the symbols that shaped our national consciousness. And…

When Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi for his two-day state visit, the world watched with an anxiety it could barely conceal. For Washington, Brussels, and even Beijing, the chemistry between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Russian President has begun to resemble less a routine bilateral engagement and more the birth of a geopolitical…

The Congress party’s latest allegation—that the Narendra Modi–led NDA government is preventing Leader of the Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi from meeting visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin—deserves closer scrutiny than political rhetoric allows. What has been framed as an assault on democratic tradition may, in fact, be little more than a political misunderstanding amplified for partisan…

In a world where military preparedness is increasingly defined not just by firepower but by technological sophistication, India has once again proven that its defence research ecosystem is maturing rapidly. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has successfully carried out a high-speed rocket-sled test of a next-generation aircraft escape system in Chandigarh—an achievement that…

India’s judiciary has often been described as the last refuge of the common citizen. And yet, over the past decade, that refuge has repeatedly been weakened—not by government interference, as the Opposition theatrically alleges, but by internal decay: VIP culture in court corridors, celebrity lawyering masquerading as constitutional morality, midnight theatrics, forum shopping, frivolous PILs…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s customary address ahead of the winter session of Parliament is usually a curtain-raiser. This time, it was a warning. No ambiguity, no hedging—just a blunt message to an Opposition that has turned disruption into a political habit: Parliament is for policy, not theatre. With 13 key bills lined up—including long-pending structural…