| In the mangalsutra-manifesto debate, here is a whole new wrinkle. For all the hullabaloo about a Congress plot to take women’s mangalsutras, RBI data shows that it is actually Modi who is snatching families’ gold jewellery and their proverbial mangalsutras, wrote Praveen Chakravarty. Indians mortgaged their gold jewellery to borrow more than Rs 1 lakh crore in 2023-24, nearly five times more than they did in 2018-19. This is the fastest growth in gold loans in recent history. ‘Selling the family silver’ is an English idiom to denote desperate times, which in India equates to ‘mortgaging the family gold’.
PM Modi’s mangalsutra politics was all about stoking fears among Hindu voters about the benefits that he said would accrue to the Muslim community if Congress is voted into power. He was immediately called divisive. But Vamsee Juluri wrote that the Indian political faultline isn’t along a “uniter versus divider”. Now, it all sounds like “divider vs divider”. In both camps, the long-running colonial-era assumptions about “ancestral sins” remain alive and well in rhetoric and stated policy goals.
A video of a dancing student has torn into the new ‘everything is normal in Kashmir’ narrative. The video showed a student performing a Bollywood-inspired dance at the Government Medical College in Anantnag. That was enough to unleash the old tropes of threatened Kashmiri identity. Letting students from outside Kashmir into the state, many suggested, was polluting the minds of youth. Through the course of Kashmir’s long jihad, Islamists have always cast India as a predator seducing the region’s people with modernity, wrote Praveen Swami. Its separatist politics has benefitted from pitting Kashmiri Islamic identity against India’s modernity-suffused vice.
The neighbourhood has always been a little bewildering for India’s foreign-policy makers. And it has never been more critical, wrote Rajesh Rajagopalan. As China’s power and influence grow, New Delhi has a stronger reason to look beyond Pakistan and actively engage with other neighbours. Now, South Asia matters to Beijing much more than it did to either the US or the Soviet Union during the last Cold War. This gives the smaller countries greater leeway to both counter India and play New Delhi and Beijing off against each other.
Nearly two decades ago, India's original education entrepreneur Arindam Chaudhuri burst into public consciousness and conversations with his audacious ways. And then a long list of controversies and court cases followed and he retreated behind a wall of silence. What is Arindam Chaudhary up to these days? I sent Vandana Menon to find out. She returned with an exclusive interview and glimpse into his gym-obsessed life, writing a host of self-published books and waiting to be part of the establishment again. He isn’t keen on IIPM now. The only con he ran is this: “They were conned into thinking they were coming to learn how to have a luxurious lifestyle. Unfortunately, they ended up getting educated.” Read this curiosity-satiating interview.
Aligarh Muslim University has a new VC and it's a woman. And she is up against the ‘bearded elite’ and a whisper network that seeks to undermine her elevation, cast doubt on her capabilities and pegs her politics to the BJP. But Naima Khatoon hasn't just broken glass ceilings. She knows how to shatter it, wrote Antara Baruah. |
