From torn nomination papers to alleged police partisanship, the run-up to the local body elections has raised questions about the state machinery and the NDA’s conduct, even as the TDP denies the charges and points fingers back at the YSRCP.

The Election Commission of India has announced a slew of course corrections and a show of unity, but experts and activists say the measures leave core issues unaddressed and accountability unfixed.

The Home Ministry’s sudden notification to change who can become an enumerator for Census 2027 is generating suspicion, with allegations that the BJP wants to extend its political agenda through the census as well.

There is a definite Left imprint in the ongoing protests across cities, which shows an interesting amalgam of new media with old rights-based issues.

The acclaimed writer places her writing in the “weird speculative fiction” tradition, a hybrid genre where magical realism is infused with horror.

The ECI’s decisions began to be tracked and critiqued by the opposition from 2017 onwards. Since then, the censure has only grown louder, with each exposé reducing the credibility of this once-venerated institution.

The ECI’s decline from being one of the most trusted and reputed public institutions to an object of wide disparagement can also be traced to the re-emergence of single-party dominance.

Rather than worry about electoral gains or losses, any mobilisation against Gyanesh Kumar, the SIR, and the ECI must have as its only objective the reinstatement of full integrity in the electoral process.

The preparing of the rolls is when Indians experience a collective sense of national identity. It is this idea of citizenship that the SIR has upended with its explicitly exclusionary stance. 

The most dangerous political actors are those so convinced of the virtue of their objectives, they no longer feel obliged to examine the morality of their methods. It is here that Alan Wolfe begins to speak rather uncomfortably to contemporary India.

The use of force against protesters, the detention of journalists and restrictions on movement and internet access in Delhi have raised serious questions about the measures taken by the Delhi Police.

Luke Kennard’s Booker-shortlisted novel is a rich storehouse of tantalising absurdities that dazzle but inspire no epiphanies. 

A lavishly designed book on the Ellora Caves helps us reappreciate their otherworldly beauty.

The south-west monsoon has left Maharashtra water-starved, casting a pall of gloom over rural and urban areas alike. But it is the agrarian community, which already sees a high number of distress-induced suicides every year, that will bear the brunt.

Tishani Doshi puts the image at the centre of her poems and deploys the sonic power of language in aid of finely layered imaging and urgent myth-making.

Once the world’s cashew capital, Kollam’s industry has declined amid global competition and cheaper mechanised processing elsewhere in India. As factories shut, thousands of women workers, many marginalised, pay the price.