The India of Narendra Modi is ill-equipped to cope with a whimsical and temperamental American president.

History books would consign Rai to a very low and unworthy place; yet, the CAG’s silence in the last ten years has taken a toll on our collective sense of moral and ethical values.

As media adviser, I witnessed his quiet resilience, democratic commitment, and moral clarity during the turbulence of his second term. In a time of corporate discontent, media frenzy, and political sabotage, he chose integrity over coercion, embodying the values of a true statesman.

Suddenly the judiciary finds itself being asked to redraw a red line that the politicians had drawn more than three decades ago.

In most BJP-ruled states, a new political economy of coercion and intimidation has emerged. Minorities are being systematically pushed out of local economies, their spaces, and their communities—driven to the margins.

Priyanka Gandhi's victory means the centrality of the Gandhi family in Congress affairs stands reaffirmed and sanctified.

The national interest demands that our political leaders make a demarcation between collective well-being and an individual businessman’s legal difficulties.

The new Chief Justice need not seek to carve out a name for himself in history books; he will be remembered in history if he simply remembers that he is empowered enough to see to it that  a wayward executive does not maul the constitution.

The intelligence establishment in Ottawa can be excused for locating in the Indian home minister’s political DNA an eagerness to move beyond conventional “dos and don’ts”, an appetite for risk and recklessness.

The modern Indian state’s grand principles of law and constitution cannot be decided by personalised divine inspiration.

As the RSS inches towards its 100th year, Bhagwat and his co-sanghchalaks realise that the organisation has failed to capture national imagination and admiration.

The Modi-Shah insistence was on ending the debate over the nature of autonomy and authority Srinagar was to have vis-à-vis New Delhi and they hoped voters would place a 'democratic' imprimatur on this argument. J&K's electorate denied BJP that kind of endorsement. This is a strategic setback, whichever way the Modi apologists may want to slice it.

Jan Breman and Ghanshyam Shah lay out in granular detail Gujarat’s evolution from the pre-colonial era to the Hindutva-drenched polity that it has become today.

The prime minister’s spear-carriers should feel elated that their man is still deemed capable of suborning the integrity and autonomy of constitutional functionaries. What a reputation for a prime minister to acquire that his mere presence is deemed contagious and hence to be spurned! Only those who hope for crumbs of patronage are happy to get themselves photographed with him.

Suddenly we are told that the Nagpur bosses have ideological reservations about Narendra Modi and his assiduously manufactured personality cult. Somehow, we are also expected to believe that the RSS is even unhappy about the BJP’s cultivated politics of communal polarisation.

There can be no doubt, discussion or debate that the only reason Jay Shah is set to become the next boss of the International Cricket Council is because his father is the junior partner in the old, faltering ruling firm of Shahenshah and Shah.

The institutionalised mediocrity of the past ten years has eaten into the vitality of all national endeavours. The ruling elite and its designated chamberlains have developed a deep vested interest in our own inwardness – and in the resulting aversion to global competition and universal definitions of excellence and perfection.

The Modi establishment has been shopping at the American political supermarket of discord and divisiveness. Just as Trump has made boorishness and rudeness part of his political persona, Modi too has re-defined the art of insult and invective, demeaning the dignity of his own office. 

By all accounts, Natwar Singh was a competent and accomplished bureaucrat on his own, but he came to be defined — and he did not seem to mind — as “close” to Indira Gandhi and, then, as “closest adviser” to Sonia Gandhi.

It is the historic conceit of every autocrat to think they would be able to bring unprecedented prosperity and peace in their land if only they shut down the nagging voices from civil society and the carping critics in the Opposition. Sheikh Hasina is not the first and will not be the last ruler to fall in this illusional trap.