Democracy is not just about voting every five years. Democracy is about the ability to look your government in the eye and say “you are wrong” — without fear of being beaten for it.And yes, July 20 was a sad day for democracy. It was sad to see brutal force used against young citizens. It was sad to see the Delhi Police behave in a manner that shames the uniform.
Data from India's ministry of road transport and highways show that road crashes claim around 175,000 lives each year, with pedestrians bearing a disproportionate share of the toll. In 2024, as many as 36,526 pedestrians were killed, representing 20.6 per cent of all road fatalities.
India must also deglamorise its bureaucracy. Bureaucrats occupy oversized office spaces, are allotted luxury housing, use oversized vehicles, get large numbers of support staff and personal assistants who work like personal valets and concierges. Political leaders across the globe carry their own bags. Here bureaucrats get servants to have their boots polished. This must clearly stop forthwith.
Few regions in India have such an extensive and layered system of representation. Ladakh is therefore not merely creating new councils. It is building a new model of governance based on geography, identity, participation and national interest. It is taking democracy beyond the main towns
From the Indian perspective, the extraterritorial jurisdiction clause directly implicates the Tibetan exile community residing in India, potentially exposing CTA officials, Dharamsala based researchers and Tibetan advocacy networks to a Chinese claim of jurisdiction.
The Ahmedabad verdict should not be viewed merely as the culmination of one terrorism trial. It represents the maturation of India's institutional capacity to confront terrorism through both security and law. Over the past two decades, India has steadily strengthened its counter-terrorism architecture
The revival of shipbuilding has become a central pillar of national policy, extending across defence, commerce and industrial development. Indian shipyards today construct aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, offshore patrol vessels and a wide range of commercial vessels.
The scandal at Ayodhya is not a new low really. It is all too expected as the slippery slope of a journey focused only on the ends without caring for the means. The collapse at Ayodhya is thus a logical culmination of a system of leadership, governance and capture of power that believes in and lives by the edict that results matter and how we get to the results does not.
The core data architecture — a national road safety data lake, AI-powered enforcement, multilingual public awareness — is replicable at any scale, in any South Asian language, in any South Asian urban or rural road environment. The technology does not need to be reinvented for Dhaka, Kathmandu or Karachi. It needs to be validated in Colombo and Delhi first.
The deeper problem is India’s graduate unemployment crisis. Millions of young graduates are not working, earning or acquiring experience, but preparing for competitive exams. The government job has become a lottery ticket; the coaching class has become a waiting room
India is neither Nazi Germany nor Myanmar, and historical comparisons should never be employed simplistically. However, comparative political sociology reveals a recurring lesson: when citizenship becomes tied to ideological notions of national authenticity, minorities disproportionately bear the burden of proving belonging.
The BJP is winning elections at the level of the state through sophisticated identity coalitions and institutional leverage. Gen Z is winning the internet through a combination of genuine grievance, cultural fluency, and the particular humor of people who have been told they are useless and decided to make art out of it.
Democracies need dissent. Young Indians have every right to demand credible examinations, transparent recruitment, accountable institutions and a responsive government. To delegitimise all youth anger as foreign manipulation would be intellectually lazy and politically dangerous. But it is equally naive to pretend that geopolitics ends at the border of domestic protest.
Workplace accidents impose costs far beyond the immediate loss of life and injury. Families lose breadwinners, enterprises suffer productivity losses, projects face delays and governments incur healthcare and compensation costs. The social consequences can be particularly severe for migrant and informal workers
For decades, these states invested heavily in women’s education, public health, industrialisation, literacy and population control. Fertility rates in many southern states have already fallen below replacement levels. In contrast, several northern states lagged behind for years on precisely these indicators. If parliamentary representation now shifts overwhelmingly toward states with higher population growth, the message becomes deeply perverse: governance discipline weakens political power.
At its heart, the challenge to Section 62(5) is a test of constitutional sincerity, of whether the Indian Republic truly believes that citizenship endures even behind bars. Enacted in the infancy of the republic, the provision has long outlived its moral logic. It collapses the distinction between confinement and culpability
To its credit, the new state government’s policy declaration recognised this reality. It emphasised skill development, industry-linked learning and stronger connections between educational institutions and emerging sectors of the economy. Whether those aspirations translate into measurable reform remains to be seen.
Apart from risks related to the integrity of the process, the SIR process also turns what is celebrated as the festival of Indian democracy into a nightmare for the excluded. It can create divisions and split neighbourhoods, particularly when the numbers are large and hotly contested, as they have been in the most recent example in the state of West Bengal.
The rise of the Cockroach Janata Party may ultimately fade as quickly as it appeared. Most internet movements do. But the frustrations driving it are real and unlikely to disappear soon. Millions of young Indians feel politically unheard and economically cornered. Increasingly, they are expressing that frustration not through traditional political participation, but through irony, parody and nihilistic humour.
