The race begins.

15-11-202528 STORIES

In this issue

BIHAR 2025—The Lede

One hundred years of neglect

Colonial plunder never ended for Bihar; only changed hands. Recovery needs both justice and good governance.

Manoj Kumar Jha

Bihar election cover image

Editor’s note: The great Bihar sprint

Another political race begins, marked by fanfare, cash, caste, and missing voters—a contest where democracy seems to limp behind.

Bihar Assembly election women.jpg

The Bihar roulette

An ageing Nitish, restless youth, and restless castes make Bihar’s election a churn without a centre.

How Muslims vote in Bihar

For decades, the community voted like everyone else. Then the BJP rose to power, and Muslim voters began choosing whoever could keep Hindutva at bay.

Protest march

The SIR shadow

Election Commission’s voter revision has deleted 47 lakh names, stoking fears that even marginal shifts could decide Bihar’s notoriously tight races.

Yogendra Yadav

Activists flag duplicate voters

Too many duplicate voters in revised voter list in Bihar, claim opposition leaders.

FROM THE SIDELINES

Will Bihar go the ‘Maha’ way?

In Bihar, the Mandal story is far from over. If JD(U)’s tally slips below its own, the BJP will not think twice before taking the reins.

Vijay Hansaria

FRONTLINE CONVERSATIONS

Time to correct a historical wrong: Vijay Hansaria

The Senior Advocate discusses Ladakh’s growing demand for Sixth Schedule status and the larger constitutional questions it raises.

Sikh activists block highway.jpg

Guarding or gagging?

Punjab’s new sacrilege Bill, rooted in colonial-era rules, risks curbing constitutional freedoms and echoes blasphemy laws in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Ashutosh Sharma

Coldrif cough syrup.jpg

Deadly doses

Twenty four children in MP died from spurious cough syrup, revealing systemic failures in India’s health delivery beyond a single tragedy.

Vedaant Lakhera

Punjab fields inundated with water due to floods

Rivers redraw Punjab

Neglect and encroachment have unleashed Punjab’s rivers on its fields. The cost: vanished farms and livelihoods, and threat to national food security.

Ashutosh Sharma

Ladakh: More missteps from Modi-Shah

Six years after Article 370 was removed, Ladakhis feel marginalised and betrayed because an insensitive Centre has dashed their hopes and aspirations.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Badze Leshüki

Indigenous knowledge systems

Badze Leshüki, Nagaland’s rooted classroom

At this unique school in Nagaland, students’ lives follow nature’s cycles, grounding them in indigenous knowledge systems.

Vishü Rita Krocha

Malda Ration Distribution

DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS

Faux welfare

India has replaced genuine welfare—education, health, justice, and environmental care—with short-term handouts that buy loyalty but stunt progress.

Freed Palestinian hostage

Palestinians hear life again after 737 days of war. Can it last?

Gaza relearns the sounds of survival, but the ceasefire’s durability depends on unresolved questions of disarmament, governance, and accountability.

Iftikhar Gilani

rbi rupee fall.jpg

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES

Rupee’s free fall and RBI’s silence

The central bank once spent billions defending the rupee. Now it watches it fall, saving ammunition for when Trump’s real assault begins.

C.P. Chandrasekhar

Salt Workers

Salt of suffering

In Gujarat’s Little Rann of Kutch, Agaria salt farmers toil under the desert sun, eight months a year, with no homes, water, or basic ameneties.

Vivan Sundaram.JPG

Sundaram’s final stations

The artist’s last work turns his wounded body into a meditation on endurance, faith, and the political scars Kashmir continues to bear.

Ram Kumar: Painter of the human soul

Bengaluru’s Museum of Art and Photography is celebrating the modernist’s birth centenary, tracing his artistic journey from figuration to abstraction.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

Kantara Chapter 1

Counter Culture

Kantara’s cosmic failure

The sequel drums down spectacle over substance, mistaking divine intervention for justice while sustaining the hierarchies it claims to challenge.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Manish Gaekwad

The boy who lived between two worlds

Manish Gaekwad’s memoir charts his passage between a Calcutta kotha and boarding school, but it is his mother who commands the stage.

Indira Gandhi and Indian diaspora.jpg

Dissent without borders

Sugata Srinivasaraju’s book shows how a forgotten diaspora network, armed with Gandhian ideals and stubborn moral clarity, fought Emergency from afar.

Karthick Ram Manoharan

Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and health camp

How Hindutva comes for Adivasis

Choubey’s study reveals how the VKA uses service delivery to advance a larger agenda: dissolving tribal identity into undifferentiated Hindu majority.

Sharmila Purkayastha

Cambridge

Alice in underland

R.F. Kuang exposes the corrosive allure of academia in this novel whose density is a comment on the community it describes.

Mridula Vijayarangakumar

Representative image

Loving, leaving, and everything in between

Despite promising voices, this anthology on leaving offers little thematic coherence—just disparate musings that never quite land together.

Dakshayini Suresh

New books on the shelves

A magical realist novel about a river with political acumen, a volume that redefines Tamil Studies, and much more.

Fish All The Way Cover

Fish all the way

Translated from Telugu by D.V. Subhashri

Mohammed Khadeer Babu

‘The Dystopian Times’ by Appupen

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