Best Chief Ministers | Saffron supremacy

Over the past decade, India’s political landscape has been defined by a powerful convergence of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and display with claims of administrative efficiency, most visibly in the BJP-ruled states. This fusion has allowed the party’s most ideologically assertive chief ministers to dominate public imagination in ways their counterparts on the opposite end of…

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Opposition | The road to revival

Indian politics is moving into a season of reckoning. After a decade of BJP dominance that has reshaped not just electoral politics but the very grammar of political discourse in India, the Opposition finds itself at a crossroads. The defeats in Haryana and Maharashtra last year were particularly bruising, coming as they did after the…

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Economy | Growth faces headwinds

As the global economy grapples with its severest crisis since the pandemic, India has caught a particularly biting strain of the flu. Geopolitical tumult—Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and now Donald Trump’s killer tariffs—has disrupted global trade and dented investor confidence. That third factor hits directly at India’s momentum. We hold…

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The busy beekeeper | Gajanan Bhalerao

Where others run far when they hear bees buzzing, Gajanan Bhalerao runs towards them. They have been his childhood friends since the time he was growing up in Sawana in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district, climbing trees to hunt for beehives, squeezing the nectar out of them and licking the honey off his fingers. If they stung…

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Garbage to gold | Tariq Ahmad Ganie

T he roads and water bodies leading to Gadihama, the last, and perhaps remotest, village of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district, are strikingly clean. Starkly different from the Valley’s other rural parts, no garbage meets the eye as one cuts through jampacked apple orchards and finds the crystalline Aharbal waterfall feeding into the Veshaw river, the…

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Turning over an old leaf | Arindam Dasgupta

In a remote corner of Assam, where the rustle of areca nut (tamul in Assamese) leaves falling to the ground went mostly unnoticed, Arindam Dasgupta spied something different. Where others saw waste, he saw possibility. That vision gave birth to Tamul Plates Marketing Pvt Ltd in 2010, a social enterprise founded not in the boardrooms…

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