| Even a united INDIA coalition without its fissures could not have saved the Congress from the drubbing it received in the Hindi heartland. The squabbles are a side-show. As of now, only Modi can defeat Modi, wrote Vir Sanghvi after the BJP swept through Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh in the assembly elections.
And despite, or rather because of, its handsome victory in Telangana, the Congress has now come under the greatest burden of political identity, wrote Shruti Kapila, who likened the coalition to a poisoned chalice. On the other hand, the BJP has shown agility in incorporating otherwise inimical social groups, whether it’s tribals or Dalits, she wrote.
It’s tempting to reduce India’s political landscape to a North vs South binary or to glibly suggest that the Ladli Behna Yojana led to the BJP victory in Madhya Pradesh, wrote Congress party member Amitabh Dubey. The BJP’s Hindutva politics finds greater resonance in northern and western India, but the party has been defeated there before and will be defeated again in the future, he warned.
Fault lines are also emerging at COP28 in Dubai. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s absence at the climate summit was conspicuous. But China’s high-level absence from crucial summits seems to be part of a recurrent pattern, wrote Sana Hashmi.
Unless the COP28 summit recognises the global view presented by India, achieving universal solutions and consensus will be difficult, says columnist Seshadri Chari. He suggests that the global community must adopt LiFE and rally towards “mindful and deliberate utilisation, instead of mindless and destructive consumption”.
Anirudh Kanisetti takes us back in time to medieval India and shows how Jewish traders connected Mangalore to Egypt and Spain. India is often treated like a side-act to Jewish history in Europe. But India and Egypt were central to medieval Jewish merchants, he wrote.
Earlier this week, the ‘rat-hole miners’ were hailed as India’s heroes after they dug their way through the collapsed Silkyara tunnel to rescue the 41 trapped labourers. Jyoti Yadav met the team from Delhi that has emerged as another symbol of India’s jugaad mentality. Everyone wants a piece of the miners’ heroism, but nobody is talking about the conditions they work in—the lack of safety gear, insurance, regular wages, and healthcare.
Vandana Menon travelled to Neeraj Chopra’s two-storey home in Khandra, Panipat. His javelin throw, honed in the fields of Panipat, shattered India’s Olympic glass ceiling at Tokyo 2020, making him the country’s first track and field athlete to claim gold. Now, he’s out to prove it was no lucky toss.
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