Election watch

  1. ‘Corruption first, citizenship later’: Shoaib Daniyal on why CAA is having little impact on the Bengal elections.
  2. A new generation of ‘Miya’ Muslims in Assam may vote for Congress-AIUDF – but only out of compulsion, writes Arunabh Saikia.
  3. Will MK Stalin’s reshaping of the DMK pay off – and vindicate Karunanidhi’s succession plan, asks Sruthisagar Yamunan.
  4. Will poor organisation be a roadblock for BJP in its Bengal stronghold of Jungle Mahal, asks Shoaib Daniyal.
  5. Assam elections: The state with the worst gender-based violence gets a women’s manifesto, writes Sreeparna Chattopadhyay.
  6. Bengal election: How BJP and TMC are using old census data to fuel identity-based politics, writes
    Snigdhendu Bhattacharya.

Weekend Reads

  1. “One hundred and twenty-three days into the farmers’ protest, as Delhi’s burning summer approaches, one of the few women farm leaders there, Harinder Bindu, describes her 30-year journey in building solidarities across caste, class and gender to Riddhi Dastidar.
  2. The myth of Congress socialism: Pratinav Anil says Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were never really on the Left to begin with.
  3. Aniket Aga, KA Shaji and Chitrangada Choudhury trace the evolution of the Love Jihad myth from Kerala into the rest of the country.
  4. The Keeladi excavations may alter the world’s ideas about the earliest Indians. But, Sowmiya Ashok writes, progress hasn’t been smooth for one of the country’s most sensational archaeological projects.
  5. “When I wrote this book [Midnight’s Children] I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu,” writes Salman Rushdie. “All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a brutal sectarianism believes otherwise. But I find hope in the determination of India’s women and college students to resist that sectarianism, to reclaim the old, secular India and dismiss the darkness. I wish them well. But right now, in India, it’s midnight again.”
  6. “From a junior India international boxer to a gangster carrying a Rs 2 lakh reward,” Mahender Singh Manral and Mihir Vasvada write on “how Deepak Pahal left the ring to be a on-the-run dreaded criminal involved in two daring escapes plus multiple murder and extortion cases.”
  7. Jasan Farago puts together a visual breakdown of a Mughal miniature to explain what a tiny masterpiece reveals about power and beauty.
  8. “China has steadily brought Indian security under pressure through unconventional instruments, including cyberattacks, its reengineering of the cross-border flows of rivers, and its nibbling away at disputed Himalayan territories. It seeks to employ all available means short of open war to curtail Indian ambitions and strike at core Indian interests,” writes Brahma Chellaney.
  9. “Call it a late-pandemic crisis of productivity, of will, of enthusiasm, of purpose. Call it a bout of existential work-related ennui provoked partly by the realization that sitting in the same chair in the same room staring at the same computer for 12 straight months (and counting!) has left many of us feeling like burned-out husks, dimwitted approximations of our once-productive selves,” writes Sarah Lyall.
  10. “This has been the hardest thing for people who didn’t work from home before the pandemic to visualize: your current WFH scenario is not your future WFH scenario. Your options are not ‘in the office, with other people, 9 to 6 every day’ or ‘miserable and alone in my small apartment,’” writes Anne Helen Petersen.