| The Mumbai meeting of INDIA alliance and the two recent national mood surveys put the spring back into the nation’s beleaguered Opposition. But the new panel on One Nation One Election headed by Ram Nath Kovind is changing the public debate again.
Narendra Modi, however remains the principal theme and factor, which could turn the 2024 election into a plebiscite on his personality, wrote Shruti Kapila. Herein lies the key problem and temptation for the Opposition: Should it make Modi central to its line of attack or not? Beyond just invoking Nehru, it must ask what an alternative nationalism might look like?
But not just the vision, there is also that question about Congress leadership. DK Singh wrote about Rahul Gandhi’s Hamletian dilemma — to be or not to be the PM candidate, to consume or not consume the ‘poison’. Then he argued that there are many reasons why Mallikarjun Kharge as the prime ministerial candidate may be a better option: it will force the BJP to go back to the drawing board and come up with an innovative strategy.
Yogendra Yadav wrote that the numbers thrown up by the Mood Of The Nation survey don’t need to be taken too seriously. Seats forecast nine months before actual polls can only be broadly indicative. And while their sample size is big, the methodology adopted by both these polls leaves much to be desired. But two things are clear: One, there is growing anti-incumbency below the surface, provided the Opposition knows where and how to tap it. And two, Uttar Pradesh remains the Achilles’ heel for the Opposition.
Will Xi Jinping attend G20 in India or not? No official word yet. But the G20 event next week should not be allowed to define India’s politico-military negotiation posture toward China, writes retired Lt General Prakash Menon. Instead, G20 being a multilateral forum must be treated separately and it would serve India’s interests better if the border issue is distanced from it.
Our conception of “Indian civilisation” today is dominated by the handful of ancient texts, which appealed most to colonial writers and early nationalists, wrote Anirudh Kanisetti. However, both these reinventions actually miss a crucial strand of medieval history: the nagaraka. The cosmopolitan man-about-town pursued—unashamed by later Victorian-esque morals—a refined enjoyment of all the world’s pleasures. Such connoisseurs wrote a number of texts throughout the early medieval period, roughly 600–1100 CE, exhibiting their knowledge of arts such as perfumery, gemology, painting, erotic love, dance, and music.
Is ‘Hinduness’ missing from Bengali cinema? An interview with Bengali filmmaker Subhrajit Mitra, threw up questions about Hindu themes. He told Deep Halder: “I am all for Ray, Sen and Ghatak. My point is why stop with them? Is there any dearth of heroes in Bengal’s history? Also, why shy away from Hindu narratives?” Mitra is set to do a remake of Devi Chowdhurani, a magnum opus on the Sannyasi Rebellion of 1770. Novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s religiosity makes today’s Bengali filmmakers sceptical about such remakes, he added.
Continuing her series on the Parsi community, Shubhangi Misra wrote that the winds of change that the Uniform Civil Code threatens to herald have exposed fault lines within the seemingly homogeneous Parsis, and at the forefront of this movement are four women. Both sides are writing open letters and op-eds, pinging each other in WhatsApp groups, discussing it over dinner at their homes, and arguing about it within the confines of their walled enclaves. Marriage, divorce, inheritance, and temple rights are currently skewed in favour of men.
Karishma Hasnat travelled to an important Manipur-Myanmar market called Moreh and found that the recent ethnic conflict between the Kukis and the Meitei communities has severely impacted this informal but once-vibrant cross-border trade.
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