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Hiren Joshi, Officer on Special Duty or OSD (Communications & Information Technology) in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), is an important name in the country’s most powerful office at the joint secretary rank since 2019. He is a permanent presence in WhatsApp message feeds of prominent journalists in big media, directing headlines and as per […]
By Deep Mukherjee In September this year, the Rajasthan assembly passed the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2025, which has the provision for life imprisonment as the maximum punishment for illegal religious conversion. In one of the first cases registered under Rajasthan’s recently-enacted anti-conversion law, two Christian pastors have been booked in Kota district […]
Aakar Patel Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Some years ago, the Niti Aayog had said it would prepare a “single, informative dashboard for all the twenty-nine (later 32) global indices” on which India was ranked. This monitoring exercise was “not just to improve rankings but to improve systems and drive reforms to attract investments and to shape […]
Pavan Korada In its report revealing the Sangh’s lobbying effort, the ‘Prism’ news outlet also highlighted legal and transparency concerns among foreign influence experts in the US. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has hired a prominent American lobbying firm that is also on the payroll of the government of Pakistan, a move that has ignited […]
Seema Chishti Bihar matters a lot for the opposition INDIA bloc, but for the BJP, it matters much more. Bihar matters a lot for the opposition INDIA, if only to regain the political momentum that the BJP getting just 240 MPs in the Lok Sabha in 2024 had given it. But for the BJP, Bihar […]
By Badri Raina A formula to defeat all ‘bad’ conspiracies to unravel Bharat. In yet another peroration on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, with characteristic balance and good sense, has cautioned us not to club all Muslims in one “bracket”. He has underscored how only some Indian Muslims speak […]
UNESCO’s campaign, “CTRL + ALT + MUTE,” aims to counter the rise of AI-facilitated abuse through policy action and advocacy. Illustration: The Wire, with Canva. Nearly three-quarters of women journalists have faced violence online, with artificial intelligence now being used to dangerously amplify threats ranging from deepfakes to doxxing, UNESCO has warned. The UN’s cultural agency […]
By Madhu Sudan Chatterjee Several members of Padabi Tudu’s family said that they tried to make the attackers see sense, but could not. Authorities also allegedly refused to step in during the final attack. Residents of Chapur village in Bengal’s Jangalmahal district of Purulia on October 20 brutally murdered a woman of their own family […]
By M K Venu Any assessment of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and its 100-year journey cannot possibly ignore its long term symbiotic links with other organisations that parallelly promoted the cause of the Hindutva ideology. A fascinating part of this story is that these prominent parallel organisations promoting Hindutva, such as the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu […]
Leading political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot is in conversation with Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire about the origins and foundational thinking of the Sangh. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh turned 100 on September 27, 2025. What has its journey as a political organisation involved over the past century, as it moved from being on the margins of […]
That there is no unity of purpose between the prime minister, the CEC and the LoP on vital questions linked to the future of democracy is a national misfortune. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty What’s the real threat: a cry to protect democracy, or an act to destroy it? Democracy is hollowed out when constitutional principles are […]
Ambedkar had once warned against hero worship as a ‘sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship’, but Modi’s birthday blitzkrieg paid no heed to such caution as it took an unprecedented scale. “The God Almighty himself has sent Modiji as an avatar purush to lead our motherland to become the greatest nation on earth”; “It is […]
“It has been almost a month since my sister killed herself,” Rifat Jahan said, sitting in her home in Ahmedabad’s Gomtipur. On August 9, Rifat’s 15-year-old sister Saniya Ansari ended her own life, leaving behind a suicide note, a devastated family and questions about the Disturbed Areas Act. The Ansari family’s purchase of a house […]
The Supreme Court on Monday (September 15) morning has put a stay on key provisions of the controversial Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025. According to LiveLaw, the bench of Chief Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice A.G. Masih passed these orders: 1. The provision in Section 3(1)(r) that a person should be a practitioner of Islam for five […]
The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) national president J.P. Nadda on September 14, Sunday said that the BJP, with “14 crore” (140 million) members is now as the world’s largest political party. The BJP has been unable to find a successor to party president Nadda for a year and a half. His term as party president […]
While the Gujarat government has received 89,948 applications for educational aid from diamond workers, it has so far provided financial assistance to only 170 children for the school fees of only 170 children, data provided to the State legislature on Tuesday (September 9) has revealed. Congress MLA Tushar Amarsinh Chaudhary had asked a question on […]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a new residential complex for Members of Parliament (MPs) on New Delhi’s prime avenue, Baba Kadak Singh Marg. News reports highlighted that the residential complex has four towers, named after four Indian rivers; each tower features 25 storeys and has a total of 184 flats meant for the MPs. “…these […]
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) held a meeting in Parliament House on the morning of Tuesday (August 5), a date which has grave historical recall because in 2019 the Government of India revoked the special status, or autonomy, granted under Article 370 of the Indian constitution to Jammu and Kashmir. This day is also a […]
Pragya, in her late 20s, has shaved her head. Not because she wanted to, nor because she has the kind of chronic illness one would usually associate with baldness. Her fatigue was the cause – combing her hair every day took so much out of her that she didn’t feel like she could do it […]
Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – an unprecedented democratic rupture in India’s republican history. Spanning from 1975 to 1977, the Emergency did not merely suspend democratic norms and undermine constitutionalism; it revealed, with brutal clarity, an authoritarian impulse cloaked in constitutional legality. While the immediate trigger was the invalidation of Gandhi’s 1971 election […]
