Politics and public life
Elections, parties, leaders, courts, law, ideologies and free speech.
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Thoughts on the 5 Point Plan?
X.T.M quotes the Cockroach Janta Party’s five-point plan, from barring Chief Justices from Rajya Sabha seats to a 20-year ban on defectors, and strongly disagrees with the defection ban but…
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Open Thread: Raga the Martyr?
Open thread on 21 July in Delhi: a photograph credited to PB of Sapan News of Rahul Gandhi being carried out of a large student and youth demonstration against the…
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The Self-Confident Hindu
X.T.M asks whether a self-confident Hindu majority is a bad thing, arguing that India is a source rather than an appropriator of culture and that a confident majority held to…
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Did Modi Make India Great Again?
X.T.M, writing from Delhi, weighs what one Modi tenure has compounded against Britain’s seven prime ministers in a decade, citing India’s rise to fourth-largest economy, and asks what continuity buys…
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The Crescent and the Trident clash over their women
X.T.M argues that the Crescent’s seclusion and the Trident’s ‘protection’ of women are unequal in statute, citing Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinances, but equivalent in structure, as the bahu-beti bachao slogan and…
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Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States
X.T.M reports a conference claim that India and Pakistan are post-imperial states smothering small nations, does not adopt that frame, and argues that ethnicity resurges in Pakistan because Islam has…
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Reading Dawn in Delhi.
X.T.M reports Beena Sarwar’s talk at Mela Nordic’s Stockholm Partition event, tracing the end of Aman ki Asha to Sapan, a volunteer network with a minimum common agenda that bans…
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The Meltwater Carries No Passport
X.T.M reports Anuradha Bhasin’s talk at Mela Nordic’s Stockholm Partition event, which proposed cross-border newsrooms, a shared archive and arts as empathy, and weighs it against earlier attempts such as…
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Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan
Pakistan is usually read as drifting ever deeper into theocracy. We argue the reverse: its elite has quietly secularised, keeping Islam as the national language while shedding it as the…
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Is Kabir Right?
X.T.M tests Kabir’s claim that many Hindu-nationalist readers come to BP to litigate Pakistan and Muslims. The essay argues that blaming outsiders gives India a permanent excuse, since caste, corruption…
