Contrast this exchange against the utterly crass and debased rhetoric, both during the election season and otherwise, that India’s political and cultural leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, employ.
The narratives elucidate how historical marginalisation, compounded by contemporary socio-economic inequities, lays fertile ground for the propagation of Naxalite ideology, which promises liberation from caste-based oppression and economic deprivation.
The war clouds just keep getting thicker and darker. And the warmongers have so far outshouted those pleading for peace. The leaders have failed to bring any sanity, let alone ceasefire or peace talks. All this does not bode well for the Indian economy, which has already been struggling with the challenges of inflation, stagnant private investment, high youth unemployment and widening inequality.
This is the inner rottenness of India’s growth story, a self-imposed colonisation of a nation that has lost its standing, never mind the growing GDP.
What applies to India can also work for other nations. So one hopes that world leaders participating in COP27 will reach actionable decisions and obtain the funding already promised by the developed countries to make a serious start to creating a sustainable global environment and avoid further climate change within the next few decades.
There can be no doubt that the direction of the Ukraine conflict may cast a long shadow on India’s presidency.
Taking a cue from Africa, can South Asian countries conduct strategic and collective consultations to build a nest?
Following the crash of a Cheetah helicopter on 5 October 2022, the second such helicopter to crash this year (the earlier one was in March 2022), the Indian Army Wives Agitation Group (AWAG) wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing anguish over the continued use of the outdated Cheetah and Chetak Light Utility Helicopters (LUH), which have claimed many lives of experienced and young officers.
Today SEWA has some 2.1 million members making it the single largest trade union of its kind in India serving and representing self-employed women workers in 18 states
Interestingly CCI’s ruling was not the result of or in response to any complaint by a user, vendor, advertiser or customer. It came out of a summer project done by three student interns, who studied the EU case and its applicability to Indian conditions
The Chinese leadership's exhortation to the PLA to improve its capability sufficiently to win local wars must be a wake-up call to India's military strategists and operations planners.
The fact that the bulk of whatever aid goes to Pakistan is grabbed by the military and used for terrorism is of little consequence to the US, as is the fact that it was Pakistan that engineered the humiliating withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
The Canadian government is doing a very big mistake by thinking that such separatists and terrorist groups operating in Canada will not harm Canada but only other countries.
It is possible to use the numbers to argue in many ways but what should be reasonable to note is that there is no conspiracy among a certain set of people to grow their numbers. Demographics tells us that as the level of education (particularly of the woman) and the standard of living of the family moves up, the number of children per woman generally comes down.
A mere look at the map of Tripura showed that the insurgents were operating from the hills where there was no police presence as all the police stations and posts were on the main roads. I was convinced that we should move into the hills.
The statue has cost substantial money but is fully funded by the public through a charitable trust managed by a number of Indians residing in the UK. The chair of an advisory group that oversaw the project was former Pakistani-origin mayor and minister Sajid Javed.
An increase in support of free food means cutting back on maybe health, education, infrastructure, military or pension benefits. The government cannot escape these difficult fiscal tradeoffs.
Thus the mantra of development should be spirituality with high technology. Both these things allow us to reduce our greed for resources and live in harmony with nature – something that Gandhi preached intuitively all his life.
But for Gandhi, India's political destiny would have been vastly different and her moral stature vastly inferior.
