| The year is ending and you will be inundated with year-ender articles, WhatsApp messages and your cell phone sending you 2022 moments from your photo galleries. I am not going to add to that. But here’s an interesting political pattern. 2022 wasn’t a good year for strongmen leaders, wrote Shruti Kapila. US, UK, Brazil got rid of them. The Congress party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra is India’s big chance to galvanise the population against strongmen, she added.
In the past ten days, many commentators have criticised the yatra for lack of clear goal and outcome. But Yogendra Yadav wrote that this is a sign that the yatra has captured the national mind. And that its pilgrimage-like character has managed to drill a hole in the wall of lies and hatred that face our republic.
Is Prachanda’s rise in Nepal a win for Beijing? Jyoti Malhotra wrote that the India-Nepal relationship is a deep-rooted one and can never be challenged by any other, including China. All Nepal’s rivers flow south. The open border is a model for the rest of South Asia.
Maharashtra Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis has changed. A lot. In 2022, he was a very different politician from his 2014 avatar – he has traveled quite a distance from being the voice of modernity to a Hindutva advocate, wrote DK Singh.
The Allahabad High Court’s order quashing OBC quota in urban local body elections in Uttar Pradesh was big news. But Dilip Mandal found something that everyone missed, which he calls unconstitutional, unethical and against the very idea of social justice. The last line of the order meant for the state government says this: consider “the claim of transgenders for their inclusion amongst Backward Class of citizens”.
There’s a cliché that goes something like this: anything you say about India, the opposite is also true. That’s what is happening with the controversial Agniveer programme. Months after the massive nationwide street protests by unemployed youth against the Army’s four-year Agniveer scheme, the mood has changed dramatically. A record number of people are applying to become Agniveers. Jyoti Yadav reported on two suicides by young men who were rejected during their physical tests. The two suicides is a story of desperation in rural and small-town India.
A court in Mathura has ordered an inspection of the Shahi Idgah mosque, the contentious site that Hindus say is the birthplace of Krishna. Sonal Matharu travelled to Mathura to speak to residents, lawyers and priests about the newest temple-mosque flashpoint, after Ayodhya and Varanasi. Muslims are lawyering up. Hindus are getting ready to avenge what they call a historical injustice.
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