The late scientist, C.V. Seshadri, and I spent hours discussing the idea of alternatives in dhabas and cafes around his laboratory in Chennai. Professor Seshadri, infinitely curious about in...

Populism pays, but only in the short run and for a select few. The Andhra Pradesh government, in a blatant violation of the 50 per cent cap on reservations prescribed by the Supreme Court, has made it...

Chatterjee follows Laclau in characterizing populism as a distinct political reason operating in a democracy, a modality and not any particular ideology. It creates an internal division of society bet...

Carelessness comes at a price. The amended Motor Vehicles Act aims to bring down the costliest outcome of carelessness: loss of life. But few states have been able to look past the steep fines prescri...

The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-Right President took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranchi...

A discussion on democratic politics is not complete without references to populism. ‘Populism’, however, creates more confusion than clarity. The term is indiscriminately used in the media but sel...

Today, the sense of inevitability and the inexorableness of the Narendra Modi regime are obvious. It is strange to observe people recognizing a touch of Modi in them and confessing, almost quietly, th...

Democracy, at times, can be the sum of contradictory pressures. A democratic polity, for example, accords to a popular mandate its highest honour. Such an electoral mandate could well be the fruits of...

A sweeping re-election in one Indian region has triggered what appears to be a populist wave in other parts of the country. In this instance, the pre-electoral giveaway was subsidized electricity. Thi...

One summer afternoon, while jostling through the crowd of vendors at the Grand Hotel arcade, my attention was drawn to a book in a store I used to visit before the purchase of books online came into v...