One of the greatest talents of the politicians in power at the Centre is their ability to infuse old words with new meanings. ‘Freedom’, for example, seems to mean something other than wha...

Contradictions can be illuminating. Covid-19, the World Bank stated in 2020, had led to the largest ever contraction in the global economy in eight decades. The Indian economy suffered heavy losses, m...

At certain moments the current of history can almost be seen to turn back and plunge into an abyss. The Bombay High Court had set aside the anticipatory bail given by a sessions court to a person accu...

Crises — economic or medical — invariably have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable constituencies. The Covid-19 pandemic has reiterated this hypothesis. Data from the United Nations ha...

Emotions should be recollected in tranquillity, or they run away in unintended directions. The minister of state for environment, forest and climate change, Babul Supriyo, may have expected laudatory ...

Hell fire can begin to rain on restive borders unexpectedly. But ceasefires — always welcomed by citizens manning or living along heated borders — can be as sudden. The recent joint announ...

An impressive rally — the turnout at the first public meeting of the coalition featuring the Left Front, the Congress and the Indian Secular Front was sizeable — need not translate into el...

No one relishes the prospect of a battle royale between the government and the monetary authorities. But one could boil over later this month when the flexible inflation targeting framework ...

The invisibility of India’s migrant constituency starts to dissipate when their numbers become apparent. This happened when thousands of migrant workers, pushed to desperation by the loss of job...

The prime minister’s recent remark about the ‘business of government is not to be in business’ is a well-known conservative articulation of the role of the State in economic developm...