Joiningthedots

West Bengal polls: BJP, Muslim-led parties hope to unseat TMC as religious polarisation gains ground

Bengal is not like any other state of India when it comes to Hindu-Muslim politics. Both Hindu and Muslim religious politics have deep roots here, going back to the first Partition of Bengal in 1905.

The Hindutva ideal of Akhand Bharat has held firm but its spatial, chronological extents remain hazy

Hindu nationalists view the 1947 Partition of India as only the most recent in a long series of divisions of the territory of ancient Bharat. For them, the territorial concept, drawn from ancient Hindu texts, is that the entire landmass between the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas is Bharat.

After military seizes power in Myanmar, a fresh spell of uncertainty awaits Northeast India and its neighbours

The histories of Burma, Northeast India and Bangladesh have always been intertwined.

What 'populist' means: There's more to the label, associated with leaders like Donald Trump, than meets the eye

Perhaps one reason that the word “populist” becomes useless is because it describes a wide variety of political actors, spanning the ideological spectrum.

Of bans, blasphemy laws and politically correct language: Meanings of words are not solely contained in themselves

A blasphemy law proscribing a certain word may raise awareness that a certain public behavior is socially unacceptable, but it cannot do very much more if the underlying attitudes have social acceptability.

2020, the year of conspiracy theories: As COVID-19 gripped the world, so did the desire for easy answers

Conspiracy theories offer simple, understandable explanations of events and help us regain a belief in human control over situations.

Damming Brahmaputra: With mega-dam plans, China might end up hurting itself more than India

The true idea of a river is not of a single stream of water between two banks, but a nervous system of watery arteries and capillaries that form the circulatory system of a living ecosystem in a particular river basin.

Why anti-migrant rhetoric is all bluster, no action: Nudge and wink policy allows politicians, businessmen to reap benefits

For all the Right-wing anti-migrant rhetoric now popular in many parts of the world, economic imperatives are powering migration flows that no amount of rule-making or wall-building can prevent.

2020 US Presidential Election is a referendum not only on Donald Trump, but also on his style of populist politics

It is obvious from the support for Donald Trump’s re-election bid that facts, logic and administrative acumen or its lack don’t count for much with angry people. Emotions do.

Donald Trump, Indian news channels and Bollywood: Notes on watching people say obnoxious things loudly

The job of the American president is not to entertain the world; he is not meant to be a clown. Similarly, and at a far smaller level of impact, it is not the job of TV news channels to keep viewers engrossed in the drama of what are essentially reality TV shows.