His relentless quest to piggy-back on Hindi hegemony can sway and distract, but his limitations are what Modi cannot paper over.

While there are irregularities in the movement of cash across the political spectrum, India's investigating agencies are focussing only on those who oppose the regime.

It began with his programme of introducing Hindi film music over Radio Ceylon in August 1952. India had emerged as one nation from 14 British Indian provinces and 565 kingdoms or different princely states only five years earlier.

An opposition MP reflects on the chaos and repression in the House as the BJP government scrambles to prevent the Opposition from having its say.

The four prongs of Modi’s messaging and oratory are emotions, hyperbole, sarcasm and personal attacks on opponents. His modus operandi ensures that even emotional outbursts are planned, calibrated and targeted. But calls for a caste census are a huge challenge.

There is a cold, corporate sense of distancing in the new parliament building that even the imperial old parliament never conveyed. It carried an aura and a gravitas that this one can hardly acquire.

The prime minister’s fixation is with unflinching personal loyalty from bureaucrats – a trait that both the law and centuries of experience discourage.

On the eve of Independence, the RSS's mouthpiece, Organiser, had declared that the national flag would never be respected by the Hindus.

According to the Reserve Bank of India, banks in India lost Rs 12,50,553 crore during the nine-year Modi government. Never before in Indian history had banks lost such a gigantic amount without a whisper of a scam or any public debate of consequence.

We have it in writing from the Finance Ministry that the sum total of the irrecoverable losses made by banks over the eight years and nine months of Modi’s tenure so far comes to a whopping Rs 12,09,606 crore. Why are regulators asleep at the wheel?

Modi desperately needs some leader of  the democratic world whose eyes do not remind him constantly of his human rights record – past, present or threatened.

While private refiners gained the most from the deeply-discounted imports of Russian crude, the public sector imported mainly at war-affected high international prices.

Narendra Modi has held the opposition together in Delhi, most inadvertently, and facilitated new alliances, understandings and hopes. 

In the last two weeks, parliament has been witness to majoritarian bullying like never before. The Opposition's demands for immediate discussion on the Adani scam were bludgeoned into submission by the Treasury benches, who instead demand an apology from Rahul Gandhi.

Rajya Sabha MP Jawhar Sircar says parliamentarians are totally in the dark even a few days before the grand historic inauguration of the edifice.

Based on information supplied by the finance minister, we estimate that the total non-performing assets between 2014-15- 2021-22 years amount to Rs 66.5 lakh crore. Of this, the written-off quantum appears to be Rs 14.5 lakh crore.

A perfectly eligible official, Arun Goel, was picked and plonked in a constitutional post, that of the Election Commissioner, in just a few hours by fast-forwarding a whole gamut of procedures.

Hinduism claims that it is not a proselytising religion, and the current dispensation says it abhors religious conversion. However, this tangled mind-game of who converted who and when is futile.

Various ministries fudged data to justify this expensive project which has changed the spine of the capital.

'August 15th is my own birthday,' Aurobindo had said on this day, from distant Pondicherry, 'and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance.'