The Price of India’s Soul?

July 27, 2026 X.T.M 25 Comments filed under X.T.M

On Great Nicobar, and what integration would actually require

Is the port separable from the township in practice, or only on paper?
Can 229 people hold a veto over a national project? If they cannot, who can?
Does Indian elite capital reinvest at home, and what would it look like if it did?

The Strategic Case

In August 2024 the Public Investment Board, the Finance Ministry body that vets projects with a financial fallout, examined the Great Nicobar proposal brought to it by the Ministry of Shipping. It recorded that the project did not have strategic objectives, and that strategic objectives should be added to it.

They were added. In March 2026 the Ministry of Defence notified the project as strategic. The Hindu has reviewed both the 2024 board documents and the March 2026 records of the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee, the Finance Ministry branch that must clear anything above five hundred crore.

In between, the shipping ministry asked for ₹12,300 crore of viability gap funding. The appraisal committee asked why a commercially viable project required a subsidy, and why the ministry wanted to depart from the funding norms in this case. It also asked how the port would compete with Colombo, Port Klang and Singapore. The funding was refused and the Ports Ministry was told to find the money internally.

Congress Intervenes

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The Cockroach Takes a Bow

July 26, 2026 X.T.M 186 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

On the CJP, the NEET leak, and the weapon that failed to detonate

1. How much of the patriotic framing was strategy and how much was simply the sincere register of the people who happened to be there?

2. Does the Shaheen Bagh comparison hold? The counter-case is that 2020 and 2026 are not comparable because the CAA was a policy the government wanted and the NEET leak was an embarrassment it did not.

3. Can a satirical formation convert?

Sorting out the Cockroaches?

Every major Indian protest movement of the last twelve years has faced the same attempted execution. Not by baton, though the batons come, and came again on 20 July. The execution is attempted when the state tries to answer the question who are these people? before the movement can answer it. Shaheen Bagh was minorities. JNU was tukde-tukde. The farmers held out longest and won their repeal, and were still, in the telling, Khalistanis with tractors.

It is a sorting mechanism. Once a crowd has been sorted out of the nation, its demands become negotiable in the way that a hostile faction’s demands are negotiable, which is to say not at all.

The Cockroach Janta Party won in large part because Abhijeet Dipke understood this and moved first.

The insult

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The Self-Confident Hindu

July 20, 2026 X.T.M 53 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

The Question the Thread Threw Up

Yesterday I asked whether Modi made India great again. The thread beneath it, the liveliest we have had in a while since the discussion on Gender, promptly asked a harder question: is Modi good for the Muslims? It is a fair question and it deserves to be held properly, so let me put two commitments on the table before anything else. Every minority and every people has its rights. And hatred is to be avoided at any cost. Nothing below moves either commitment an inch.

With that said, there is a question beneath the question, and it is the one this post is about. Is a self-confident Hindu a bad thing? Because that, stripped of the slogans, is what this era is actually contesting: whether the majority population of India, indigenous to the land, which did not opt for Partition, and which wrote its minorities in as full citizens, may consolidate its dharma, its mythos, its ideology into a confident and unified global identity.

Britain swears in her seventh prime minister of the decade today; India, one tenure deep since 2014, argues instead about what its majority is allowed to become. I know which argument I would rather be having.

Who Appropriated Whom

“Indians have been appropriating/adopting foreign culture for at least the past 4,000 years.” Q

Adopting, certainly. But appropriating runs the arrow backwards. Did India appropriate the zero (inventor: Brahmagupta), or give it like it did the “Arabic” numerals? Nalanda drew students from across Asia for centuries; Buddhism, born on Indian soil, remade China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. One of China’s four great classical novels is Journey to the West, and the west in question is India. Columbus was hunting a route to India when he blundered into the Americas.

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Did Modi Make India Great Again?

July 19, 2026 X.T.M 204 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Seven to One

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will be sworn in as Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. Keir Starmer resigned ten years, almost to the week, after the Brexit referendum. The CNN piece I read over breakfast had all but reconciled Britain to middle power status, and nobody in London seems to find the phrase strange anymore. Britain will have had seven prime ministers this decade. India has had one since 2014.

Everything I have been thinking about this week turns out to be the same question at different scales. The state of India. The state of Britain. The state of my own small republic of letters. What does continuity buy, and what does churn cost? Delhi will not let me put the question down.

Oh, could I have one more? Yes, please. Thank you. My fourth cup of sambar. Right now, it is sublime.

South Indian meals are, I always say, like Arabic food: a very good balance of taste and health, neither sacrificed to the other.

Ghalib at the Airport Continue reading Did Modi Make India Great Again?