The Union government’s decision to replace MGNREGA with the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) – VB-G Ram G Bill, 2025, has triggered predictable political outrage. The loudest protest, unsurprisingly, is not about livelihoods, wages, or accountability—but about the removal of Mahatma Gandhi’s name. This reaction, while emotionally charged, avoids the real…
Donald Trump’s foreign policy has never been accused of subtlety. But his so-called “Core 5” (C5) proposal—an alleged attempt to replace the G7 with a new power club comprising the US, China, Russia, India and Japan—takes strategic recklessness to an entirely new level. It is not a blueprint for a new world order; it is…
Every few months, a familiar script returns to India’s political theatre: a leader from the Congress–PDP ecosystem rises dramatically, points a trembling finger at the BJP, and declares that “minorities are under attack.” The latest performer is PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, who has taken to X to accuse the Centre of “erasing” Waqf properties. According…
India’s aviation sector has just suffered one of its worst public humiliations in years, and yet the one agency at the heart of the disaster—the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)—remains curiously untouched. Instead, the Ministry of Civil Aviation has reached for its favourite crutch: punish the airline, scold the symptoms, and leave the disease…
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…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest diplomatic engagement with Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again reaffirmed a geopolitical truth that many in the West find uncomfortable: India’s partnership with Russia is not a legacy of the past but a strategic necessity of the future. Far from being an emotional throwback to Cold War alignments, it…
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…
