There are moments when politics must stop at the doorstep of humanity, national pride and courage. The September 30 Flydubai FZ1073 incident was one such moment. A Bharatiya pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, was brutally attacked inside the cockpit by his co-pilot while the aircraft was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Gravely injured and bleeding,…
What really happened aboard the FlySaudi flight may prove to be far more consequential than an isolated aviation incident. At first glance, an incident involving a commercial aircraft can be treated as a matter of aviation security. But when the aircraft, the individuals involved and the destination are viewed against the extraordinarily complicated geopolitics of…
There is a difference between political rhetoric and political irresponsibility. Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy appears to be coming dangerously close to crossing that line. His latest attempt to explain the Congress’s political fortunes through a supposed North-South religious divide has raised precisely the questions that a Chief Minister should avoid creating. Speaking at…
There is a point beyond which journalism stops informing society and starts manufacturing confusion. When a supposedly responsible media organisation sensationalises a sensitive issue involving an independent Constitutional institution, and political parties then seize upon that report to manufacture a narrative against the institution, the consequences can be far more damaging than an ordinary journalistic…
The Supreme Court’s sharp questioning of Rahul Gandhi’s description of Veer Savarkar as a British “servant” exposed a fundamental problem with political narratives built on selective quotations: history cannot be reduced to a convenient sentence, a political slogan or a social-media meme. The Court’s intervention was particularly significant because the argument before it involved the…
There is a fashionable argument in Bharat today that China is “far ahead” of us and that catching up with it may take decades. The first part is partly true; the second is largely a matter of perception. China is ahead of Bharat in manufacturing scale, infrastructure, urbanisation, exports, high-speed rail, shipbuilding and several strategic…
The reopening of the controversial Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) case involving granite industrialist R. Veeramani has predictably triggered a political confrontation in Tamil Nadu. The ruling Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) government, headed by Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay, has ordered an intensified investigation after a Special POCSO Court rejected the earlier police…
Diplomacy is often conducted through words. Sometimes, however, a single photograph can speak louder than a thousand diplomatic communiqués. The photograph of US President Donald Trump personally receiving Chinese President Xi Jinping on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews is one such image. Trump did not merely receive Xi in Washington. He went to the…
The question confronting modern air defence is no longer merely whether an enemy drone can be shot down. It is whether a nation can afford to keep shooting down hundreds of inexpensive drones with enormously expensive missiles. That is precisely where the latest advances by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) assume strategic significance….
Enough is enough. There are moments when the judiciary has to look beyond the immediate humanitarian plea before it and consider the larger interests of the nation. The application by US national Matthew Aaron VanDyke seeking permission to travel to the United States to meet his family is one such moment. VanDyke is not an…
