PM’s speech a direct response to the Youth Protest

BJP feels the repression blowback

https://www.epw.in/journal/2026/31/editorials/youth-protest-wrests-welcome-accountability.html

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Pradhan’s Resignation Kicks Off a New Phase of Indian Democracy

Pradhan’s resignation kicks off a new phase of Indian democracy

The youth movement has initiated millions into democratic engagement for agency, exposing the limits of mainstream media propaganda

EPW / 25Jul2026

So, what has changed with the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan? The system remains the same, the establishment managing the system remains the same, the personnel leading the establishment remain the same, except for one factotum. Should we conclude that the protest led by the Cockroach Janta Party has achieved little more than a symbolic victory? Absolutely not, India’s politics has undergone a qualitative change, one that opens the path to giving substance and organic life to the formal structures of democracy that have served, in the recent past, to legitimise an authoritarian regime that has actively constricted India’s already stunted democracy.

Pradhan’s resignation establishes the principle of democratic accountability of those leading the government to the people. If the minister did not have responsibility for the failure of governance that led to the paper leaks and other bungling in India’s examination system, who could? Before the youth protest, no one in the government felt the need to be held to account.

That such a massive protest could be organized at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, in cities around the country, and online — the playground, workspace and general habitat of India’s young — is testimony to the simmering discontent among the populace. What the Cockroach Janta Party has done is to give that discontent an outlet, and a form that is non-violent, yet unyielding and unafraid, coherent, and internally united by the urge to secure democratic accountability.

Millions of people have been newly politicised — made aware that politics is about power, power that is repressive, yet can be challenged and defied, through collective action. They or those close to them have felt the swingeing pain of the police lathi, young women have experienced gendered forms of state violence, ranging from sexual expletives and verbal assaults on character to blows targeting genitals. Many have been arrested and threatened with dire police cases. Pliant universities have tried to penalize students who protest. And yet, the young people have persisted, and prevailed. They take away some important lessons.

In the face of state injustice, private rage and sorrow are of little avail. Individual acts of rebellion, on the lines of the heroic angry young man of Bollywood or the suicidal symbolism of Rang De Basanti, in which a handful of heroes take desperate action to expose corruption in high places, bring no lasting solution. Democratic engagement, with other citizens and with the state, through appeals, sit-in protests, hunger strikes, and when these fail, through sustained mass mobilization, produces results.

The protest has shattered the halo of non-biological infallibility and invincibility claimed by the nation’s Prime Minister. He has soundly condemned paper leaks as threats to the future of our young people and instituted fast-track courts to try those accused of the crime. But the youth of the land have seen this movie before, when exam papers leaked in the recent past, and wonder, in any case, why it took 45 days and a massive protest that the government tried its best to defeat and disperse for the Prime Minister to speak out against this betrayal of the people’s trust.

The discontent that evoked the massive response to the Cockroach Janta Party’s call to protest does not stem from exam bungling alone. Millions leave school and college, hunt for decent work, and fail to find any. Indian entrepreneurs fail to see that their wage bill, which they try individually to minimise, represents purchasing power for the rest of the economy, and that driving wages to the bare minimum results in a domestic market that does not grow. The government shrinks from enforcing its own minimum wage laws, as it wants to be seen to be pro-business.

India’s myopic industrial class refuses to invest in research and development, leaving innovation to its competitors abroad, some of whom have the good sense to develop owned intellectual property by employing Indian talent at global capability centres (GCCs) in India. The government bestows benediction and benign smiles on this brain drain under its normally pokey nose. The scarcity of good jobs is one source of discontent.

The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that has disenfranchised millions demands that people prove their citizenship, instead of treating citizenship as, in the words of Justice Madan Lokur, a rebuttable presumption. The presumption should be that all residents are citizens. If someone can rebut it with credible proof, then, and only then, should the presumption be abandoned. Instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to the would-be voter, the government has assumed the arbitrary power to deny citizenship to anyone it dislikes. It likes Muslims the least. Discontent has been simmering across the land over this attack on democracy, and similar other attacks on democracy.

This found reflection at the protest site, where protester after young protester denounced the government’s attempt to divide the people on religious lines. The children of BJP leaders and supporters came out in vehement disgust at such undermining of democracy. This is good for democracy, not just for the electoral prospects of a viable alternative to the ruling party.

The government is temporarily on the backfoot. In its attempts to move two steps forward, it would try divisive tactics. Reservations, the bogey of Muslim dominance, threats from Pakistan, and of terror attacks — there are plenty of divisive tropes the government can deploy to break the united resistance of the young. Expect them all to be brought to bear, in one form or another. The youth movement should be on guard against such tactics, and refuse to be divided and conquered.

Issue-based protest movements do not necessarily have a unified vision beyond the issue at hand. Yes, education is a minefield of problems to be fixed. But fixing those problems calls for a holistic vision of societal renewal far beyond education. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), people need human intelligence, creative, malleable and ever-adaptable. This government’s mantra of skilling as the mission of education cannot guide the forging of an education system or pedagogy fit for the age of AI. A programme of democratic empowerment of the people and of individuals, on the other hand, can. At no time in history, perhaps, has democratic empowerment and the unleashing of the potential for individual creativity been as integral to economic viability as it is becoming. In the age of AI, routine, repetitive tasks as well as elementary logical functions, can be delegated to robots, algorithms, and AI agents. It is human creativity and ingenuity that education must nourish, not transient skills.

India needs to build substantive, functional democracy. The ouster of Pradhan marks the beginning of a movement to that end. It must be defended against subversion, fortified with a coherent vision that extends to participative, globalised growth, eradication of structural social hierarchies and sectarian divisions along the lines of faith, region and language, and creatively roll out a programme to educate, organise and agitate.

A sustained effort to create such a programme will throw up answers to questions such as whether the movement unleashed by the Cockroach Janta Party should convert into a single political party or several new ones, or what role the wrung-out mainstream Opposition parties can play in tandem with the movement.

The mainstream media has been put on notice. Its efforts to kill the movement through silence, neglect and diversion have been foiled. The mass, youth base of social media has ensured that. The older generation still takes its information from the mainstream media. The experience of their own next generation should dent the insularity towards reality nurtured by mainstream media, but will not rupture it. But if the mainstream media does not stop being the government’s cheerleaders, the result would be to accelerate the growth of alternate, credible news sources on social media that eat into mainstream media’s dwindling advertising revenue.

The youth movement, born from a satirical response to wanton criticism of the young by the establishment, has spawned new hope, as well as hordes of new agents of democracy. March on, young heroes!

A comment from EPW>Engage

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

With these words and a litany of charges against the British crown justifying their move, delegates to the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain and formed the United States of America, 250 years ago. There were only 13 states to begin with, men in the opening statement did not stand for humanity in general, as slaves and women were excluded from those created with inalienable rights, and the founding document itself blurs the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual: animate beings are identified as creations by a Creator, laying a theistic foundation for the new state.

The Declarations ideas were drawn from the European Enlightenment, but incorporation of those ideas into a political system inspired radical change back in Europe. The French Revolution drew inspiration from the American one, for example. While the Declaration’s pursuit of inalienable rights has inspired movements for freedom around the world, the document’s assertion of a people’s right to insurrection and rebellion against a government that does not serve the people’s interests has also inspired such movements. In combination with the emphasis on individual rights and liberty in the American culture, it is possible to argue that anarchy has inherent appeal and purchase in American politics, as well as getting organised to achieve a specific end, thanks to the popularity of the Declaration. Many Trump supporters who marched on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 can plausibly argue that they saw themselves as patriots acting to undo a government that they believed had stolen their democratic mandate.

The principles of the Declaration were codified into a Constitution, which was adopted in 1787, ratified by the requisite number of states in 1788 and came into force in 1789. While the 13 states were loath to vest too much power in the federal government, gradually, the federal government acquired sweeping powers to organise production, institute taxation, carry out external trade, make treaties with other nations, and wage war. Initially, it made treaties with the nations of native Americans, broke every one of them, and virtually obliterated their presence from the land. Disease imported into the new world, ranging from smallpox to syphilis, killed 95% of the native inhabitants of the Americas, even before battles for land and domination with those who survived reduced them to corralled existence on so-called reservations, where they drink, gamble, malinger and die. Of course, they do serve the useful purpose of serving as the counterpoint for both sociologists who study high-achieving societies and medical professionals who try to understand why residents of the world’s so-called Blue Zones live for a century and more.

Slavery built the initial years of land-based prosperity. Its formal abolition involved a civil war and the flight of masses of former slaves from the South to northern cities, where trade and commerce grew at unprecedented levels. Slavery has left behind a legacy of institutional racism that thrives with a decent life expectancy, President Obama notwithstanding.

The young United States fought Mexico and annexed Mexican territories, including California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It purchased parts of Arizona and Texas also from a vanquished Mexico. The US fought Spain and acquired Spanish territories. It purchased Louisiana territory, including the Mississippi River and all lands to the west of it, doubling US territory, from France. The US purchased Florida from Spain, Alaska from Russia, the Danish West Indies from Denmark (now called the US Virgin Islands). It was part of 19^th century American ideology that it was the Manifest Destiny of the US to own and control the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The most remarkable feature of Canada is that it has not disappeared into the maw of Manifest Destiny.

James Monroe, the fifth President of the United States, declared a doctrine that demarcated European and American spheres of interest, and barred Europeans from interfering in the Western Hemisphere, in return for which the US promised not to interfere in European affairs. This was originally a defensive move, but in 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt added an eponymous corollary, according to the US the right to interfere in any nation of the Western Hemisphere, in order to stabilize its internal politics and keep out European powers. The founding of the United Nations gave the US the opportunity to lead what has been called a rules-based international order, with much of the world lining up to grant the US the international sanction it required to carry out aggression on other states without appearing like a unilateral bully. But in the Western Hemisphere, the US has rarely waited for other nations’ say-so when it felt the need to get rid of pernicious tendencies, whether backing military coups against socialist leaders or funding or directly staging attacks on Caribbean nations that thought they had the right to craft their own destinies. President Trump articulates policy through direct action, and his variation of the Monroe Doctrine, modestly dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, is exemplified by the military assault on Caracas and the snatching of Venezuela’s president for trial in the US, while a proxy runs the country on US behalf.

The initial promise to not interfere in European affairs did not prevent the US from playing a decisive role in the two World Wars of the last century. The extension of aid to the Allies during World War II, including the Soviet Union — to which materiel was shipped via sea to a port in Iran, transferred to rail rakes that travelled northeast far into Soviet territory — financed by huge budget deficits pulled the US out of the Great Depression, and made it the biggest economic and scientific powerhouse the world has ever seen.

Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and advisor to President Roosevelt, marshalled the American university system’s research capability to strengthen the war effort, including by mass production of penicillin. He led the early stages of the Manhattan Project. His report, Science, the Endless Frontier, laid the foundation for creating the National Science Foundation, through which the state funds science research, basic and applied, in the university system. He spearheaded the collaboration of academia with the state and the military that thrives even today. Military projects undertaken by faculty and students at Stanford University grew into Silicon Valley. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded projects at several removes from direct military applications, such as the mRNA vaccine that holds the promise of swiftly developing a vaccine against any threatening germ.

The US hosted and guided the Bretton Woods conferences that produced the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both of which played major roles under American leadership — the IMF is formally headed by a European, but the largest national quota, determining voting rights, is held by the US and the head of the World Bank is an American chosen by the US President — in shaping global finance and development funding, after World War II. This continued till the 1990s, when the capital markets grew large enough mediate funds without requiring direct government involvement, except in times of trouble.

The Marshall Plan effectively extended the Lend Lease programme to post-War reconstruction, creating demand for American industry and making the US dollar the predominant currency of global use. Rebuilt Europe naturally rallied behind the US in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to counter the Soviet Union and its alliance of East European satellites.

While democracy gradually strengthened in the United States, with former slaves and women getting the right to vote, without the requirement to own property, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s doing a great deal to actualise theoretical rights for black Americans, American fear of communist spread across the world led the US to throttle democracy in different parts of the world, often with violence.

Iran is one of the few places in the world never to have been formally colonized. The stirrings of democracy in much of the world coincided, therefore, with anti-colonial struggles. Whether guided by its commitment to democracy or by geopolitical calculations, the Soviet Union supported the anti-colonial struggles that continued after World War II. And wherever the US saw a Communist threat, the US acted to squash that threat. The US was not obliged to help former European colonial powers reassert their control. In Egypt, for example, the US sided with the government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser when it nationalized the Suez Canal, to the chagrin of the French and British governments. But when Communists were active on the scene, the US intervened. After the Communist-led resistance routed the French out of Vietnam, the US took over the job of bombing communism out of existence in Southeast Asia. It dropped more bombs over Vietnam than it had on enemy targets during the entirety of World War II. It killed millions of Vietnamese but eventually had to retreat, vanquished.

It saw the Communists take power in China but could do little about it. It waged the Korean war to keep the Communists out of South Korea. The US saw communists grow stronger in Indonesia and the Philippines, and supported military dictators, who dutifully eliminated Communists and the Communist threat, while also sending democracy to the Intensive Care Unit. This extended to Iraq, where the US supported Saddam Hussain. The policy not just killed thousands of Communists in Iran but also subverted, in the most evolved part of the Muslim world, the emergence of a modern version of Islam that cohabits with democracy instead of curbing it. Iran’s Islamic Revolution was a reaction to the suppression of local aspirations by the US-installed Shah. To chase the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, the US funded and armed Islamist Mujahids, and the project continued with Pakistan’s army deciding to use American funding to create its own means of strategic depth, the Taliban. Today, the two have fallen out and attack each other — but that is a different matter. The Islamic State has many inspirations but was founded by a colonel of the Iraqi army fleeing defeat after the second US invasion. The US did much, in short, to create modern-day radical Islam, a very different form of the religion from its past heyday. The US props up aggressive proxies like Israel, whose current leadership seeks domination of the region, rather than accommodation with it.

Arguably, the only place where the US has directly fostered democracy remains Japan. The US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as much to demonstrate to the rest of the world the deadly weapon it had developed as to hasten the surrender of Japan, already negotiating honourable terms for the Emperor, before Soviet forces reached Japan, after having secured victory in the European theatre. The US proceeded to occupy Japan for six and a half years. During that time, it wrote a new Constitution for Japan, carried out thorough-going land reforms, instituted organising workers into trade unions as state policy, with the goal of creating a bulwark against the resurgence of the Samurai culture, and extended the franchise to women. By the time Gen Douglas MacArthur bade goodbye to the country he had run from 1945 to 1952, more than half the workers of Japan had been unionised.

The US, it must be acknowledged, helped Indian democracy take root and develop. Much as the Americans hated Nehru’s Non-Alignment and state-led economic growth, they were happy to see the region’s largest country take the path of democracy, rather than fall to the beguiling charms of Communism. The US extended financial and other forms of aid, particularly food aid, cooperated in the formation of the World Bank’s Aid India consortium, which provided the foreign exchange needed to pay for the current account deficit that India’s inward-oriented economic policy regularly ran up. The Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in catalysing India’s Green Revolution, funding the introduction in India of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice developed elsewhere.

The US has played a major role in the evolution of modern capitalism and extending the frontiers of knowledge for all of humankind. Unregulated growth in the late 19^th and the early 20 century led to the growth of monopolies in railways, banking, steel and oil. Popular backlash against these monopolies led to trust-busting regulation and agencies to limit abuse of market power. The practice has spread. America’s state-funded research in universities and research in private companies paved the way for giant technological advances, taking humans to the moon — the US had to better the Soviet achievement of launching the first-ever manmade satellite, and sending people into outer space — creating modern electronics and communications, the first polio vaccine, and lots more.

After the market collapse of 1929, the US instituted regulation of the stock market. After the banking crisis that followed and triggered the Great Depression, the US innovated banking regulation and deposit insurance. It innovated assorted ways of mediating public savings to productive use, outside the banking system. While pension funds existed in Europe, their scale and popular base expanded with new US institutions. Venture capital emerged in the US, solving the problem that Karl Marx had identified as the primitive accumulation of capital. Today, the savings of ageing societies scour the world, looking for profitable deployment. Potential for growth, along with credible financial reporting and corporate governance, alongside sound macroeconomic management, can attract large pools of capital anywhere in the world. The US spearheaded globalised growth, fostering institutions like the World Trade Organisation, besides the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements. Countries like China, members of the ASEAN, Bangladesh and India have gained from participation in globalised growth.

The US houses not just the world’s largest and deadliest military, but also motherlodes of soft power. Its movies and music, its books and television shows dominate popular culture and set templates for swathes of the globe where people do not speak English but buy into the American conception of what is the good life. Gender diversity and equality have gained across the world, as a result, even as the US witnesses setbacks on this front. The US has been the largest provider of foreign aid, before Trump, of course, although, as a proportion of GDP, the Scandinavians outspend the US on foreign aid. American charities and foundations spread American influence.

Globalisation has enriched a tiny segment of American society, which gained access to a global market, global capital, global technology, global supply chains and global talent. The world’s first dollar trillionaire is an American, of course. But most Americans have not seen their living standards improve over the last 30 years. The average income in the US is upward of $66,000 per year. However, the median income is $20,000 lower, betraying high levels of inequality (half the population earn higher than the median income and the other half earn less than the median income). For minority groups, the income levels are even lower. At the same time, the rich grow ever richer, pay no taxes and lead lavish lives. Politicians who mine the resulting popular resentment have created a backlash against globalisation in the US, throwing up an authoritarian figure like Donald Trump to lead the nation, with his promise to disengage from the world and thrown out the world’s intrusion into the US in the form of immigrants. Trump has taken the US out of global commitments on climate change and healthcare, and cut back on foreign aid. He has pursued aggression even against allies, and abandoned all pretence to subscribe to any rules-based global order. He seeks to sideline the UN with a Board of Peace that he would lead.

Instability in the global order creates new opportunities for a country like India, as the world scrambles to find a new equilibrium. Of course, India cannot pursue strategic autonomy purely on the strength of external alliances of the right kind, but needs to build up its own internal strength.

As the United States celebrates its 250^th anniversary, other powers rise in relative importance: China definitely, probably Europe, and potentially India. The American experience has much to offer on how to go about it.

When exclusion from the electoral roll is still being adjudicated, how can that suffice to strip a person of food rations and other benefits?

Carbon capture for storage is not for India

Musk Mania: investment folly

Given the shortage of fertiliser and fertiliser feedstock, natural gas, Europe should immediately resume import of pipeline gas from Russia, to free up LNG for Asia

Europe should resume import of piped gas from Russia

This is imperative to avoid global hunger, conflict and another wave of migration from Africa to Europe

The BJP is the net gainer, at the national level, from the assembly election results: it has taken West Bengal for the first time, retained Assam and Puducherry. The Opposition is a net loser at the national level, despite the Congress victory in Kerala — it has lost Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, and the INDI Alliance has crumbled, and will stand demolished, if the Congress joins hands with film star Vijay for his TVK to form a government in Tamil Nadu.

Some claim, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the election results mark a triumph for the Modi-Shah brand of politics. But is it, really?

In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, intense anti-incumbency is in full display, with outgoing chief minister MK Stalin losing his own seat. The people could have chosen the BJP and its allies as the vehicleto for their ire. In both states, where a non-BJP alternative was available, the people chose that alternative, rather than the party of Modi and Shah. No, there is no modern-day Ashvamedha at work, in which an unchallenged BJP stallion charges on to new realms, whose rulers have to choose either to accept the suzerainty of the horse’s royal owner or defeat the soldiers trailing the horse.

To what extent did incomplete and possibly biased electoral roll revisions play a role in the electoral outcome in West Bengal? No one can say for sure. But there is little dispute over the openly communal campaign by the BJP and its leadership in Assam. Do Modi and Shah want to present Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s style of politics as their Chanakya strategy?

Mamata Banerjee ruled West Bengal for 15 years, with little to show by way of relative improvement in living standards as compared to other poor states. Her politics excelled in taking over the non-core cadre and support base of the Communists and of the Congress, marginalizing these parties in West Bengal. This gave space for the BJP to grow into the principal Opposition.

The other area where Trinamool politics excelled was in patronizing the religious minorities, and claiming to defend the Bengali identity against the outsiders, the BJP. Ordinary Bengalis find it hard to stomach the thesis that the Bengali identity is in danger from the BJP. And the politics of appeasement creates, even as it consolidates the minorities, a counter consolidation of the majority against the appeaser.

In Kerala, the Congress’s victory postpones the break-up of the coalition of Muslims and Christians with the Congress. And that is good for the state and for India as a whole. If Muslims find their alliance with the Congress not opening a path to sharing in political power, that would weaken the Indian Union Muslim League. The League, in Kerala, is a community-based party that dreads communal politics for the good reason that it would put an end to its cosy sharing of political power with other communities with minimal conflict.

If the League were to weaken, leave alone disintegrate, the political forces that are waiting in the wings to claim the mantle of Muslim representation tend to Islamism, inspired more by the churn in Arab lands than by happenings in Kerala.

Does this mean the end of the Left in Kerala? Far from it. The Left in Kerala has played the role of a democratising force. Most other parties of the state mould themselves in the image of the Left, contributing to the democratisation of Kerala. The Left lives on, in spirit, in the victory of the Congress in the state, and will be waiting to capitalise on the Congress-led government’s failures, come 2031.

The larger lesson for the national Opposition is that it must present the people with a positive vision centred on growth and democratisation, instead of merely trying to take advantage of the BJP’s many failures and failings. No such coherent vision of national redemption exists for the Congress, led as it is by a dynast who accepts no accountability for his repeated failures and is content to make excuses.

The Left finds itself with an opportunity to renew itself, focusing on building democracy and participatory, enriching growth, instead of chasing illusions of revolution in an authoritarian framework legitimised in the name of Lenin.

The people have voted out corrupt dynasts and would-be dynasts masquerading as lone champions of locally popular ideology. They need a wholesome alternative to the BJP’s politics of schism and degeneration. That, and not any relentless march of Hindutva, is the message of these election results.

A new breed of energy service organisations (ESOs) would greatly facilitate the needed switchover from imported hydrocarbons to domestically sourced electricity as the fuel for cooking, at least in urban areas. Rural areas have ready access to biomass as an alternative to cooking gas.

It never made sense for India to cook on imported fuels, whose prices are volatile and availability uncertain for reasons beyond production capacity in the source country. India imports more than 60% of the liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and 50% the natural gas used domestically. Natural gas should be prioritized for fertilizer production, instead of being diverted for cooking, or as vehicle fuel. India should ideally cook on electricity, which can be produced from local sunshine, wind and coal.

India has some of the world’s biggest deposits of coal: an estimated reserve of some 400 billion tonnes, with proven reserves of 220 billion tonnes. India struggles to mine a billion tonnes a year, and imports an additional 200 million tonnes. If gasification of coal is taken on an urgent priority, coal-based power generation can become a whole lot cleaner than it is today. In any case, more than 70% of all power generated in India comes from coal, even if half the installed generation capacity is non-fossil fuel based.

If India were to universalize electric cooking, all that would be required to be done, on the energy front, is to streamline coal mining/gasification, ideally complemented with carbon capture and use. Indian kitchens would stand insulated from geopolitical risk, exchange rate fluctuations, and cartelized production squeezes.

The government is making tentative steps towards electric cooking. It is reportedly considering tax cuts on induction cooktops, to encourage people to buy and use these devices to cook, to alleviate the shortage of cooking gas. This is not a particularly meaningful piece of policy action. The principal constraint on mass adoption of induction cooking is not the availability or affordability of cooktops and cookware but the capacity of the buildings in which cooking has to be performed to take on the additional load, and the capacity of the local grid to sustain the increased load — cooking would be concentrated in certain times of the day when a sudden surge in the demand for electric power occurs simultaneously.

India is experiencing a shortage of cooking gas when the country is also experiencing a heatwave. That means the power demand for air-conditioning would also go up.

As consumers of electricity, we mostly worry about how many units of electricity we consume and how much that costs. That is to say, we do not bother about the distinction between the electric power we need and the electricity we consume. It is straightforward enough, without grappling with Watts’ Law and Ohm’s Law on the relationships between power, voltage, resistance and current.

Analogies work. Think of power as water pressure, and electricity consumption as the water collected by turning on the tap for a particular period of time. If the only purpose was to collect water, the pressure matters only with regard to the time taken to collect the desired amount. But suppose the water is meant to turn a turbine of a particular size. Then, the pressure of the water matters. You need a minimum level of pressure to turn a turbine.

You need a minimum level of power for certain kinds of equipment to work. An air conditioner might require 1,500 Watts, an electrical iron, 2,000 W and a geyser, 1,000 W. If you want to switch all these on at the same time, your sanctioned load must be in excess of 4,500 W. Depending on how long you run these, you will consume different amounts of electrical energy, measured as Watthours (Wh), or thousands of Watthours, kWh, each unit of what is billed being one kWh.

Consider an apartment block with 28 flats, each flat with a sanctioned load of 7.5 kilowatts or 7.5 kW, this accounting for their normal usage of heating, cooling, lighting, use of water pumps, etc. If 20 of these flats start using induction stoves with an average power rating of 2,000 W, the building’s wiring will have to accommodate an additional load of 40 kW, an increase of 19%. Even if the building’s wiring and circuit-breaker infrastructure has 20% redundancy built in, that cushion would disappear, if induction cookers are introduced, and the risk of electrical fires, which are hard to put out, would go up.

In other words, introduction of induction cooking on a scale large enough to counter shortage of cooking gas cannot be a matter of individual choice and action. It calls for additional investment on infrastructure to be undertaken by whoever looks after facilities at the building complex, and by distribution utilities to strengthen the grid. If heatwave conditions persuade more people to invest in multiple air conditioners, the load per household and for the building would also go up, again calling for collective infrastructure upgrades. Who would carry that out, and who would pay for it?

This is where energy service organisations make sense. They could spare apartment owners and their management committees of the need for upfront capital investment. These companies can offer to provide heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) services, including air filtration, cooking services, refrigeration services, and lighting, taking responsibility for rewiring buildings, and replacing old and energy-inefficient equipment with new ones of the desired capacity, giving the households the option of ownership of equipment or of assured service of the equipment without having to own, maintain, and periodically replace the equipment.

Such companies would have economies of scale in purchase of different types of equipment, in maintenance and repair, in bulk purchase of electricity from renewable providers and from the distribution utility, and, crucially, in obtaining financing for the needed equipment purchase and infrastructure upgrades. These economies of scale could be shared with end-consumers.

The poor are often deprived of intended benefits of concessional electricity tariffs, because they do not have meters for their individual units in a large building, and the cumulative power consumption by the landlord would be in excess of the threshold for concessional power tariffs. These energy service companies can be mandated to instal individual meters in every rented unit, so that their electricity consumption can be accurately billed at the concessional rate, even if the company buys the power in bulk from the utility.

Urban slums can form their own cooperatives to perform the functions of an energy service organization, with mentoring by voluntary groups, and possible financial assistance from the local government. This alternative might be needed to overcome the trust deficit occupants of informal dwellings could face from formal energy service companies.

Multiple such companies could operate in a neighbourhood, so that consumers have a chance to see which ones work better, and competition would keep the companies on their toes. Such companies should be registered with the electricity regulatory body, and accountable for standards of service to consumer courts. The companies could be asked to obtain certificates of meeting process standards, as well.

President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, the transcript of a vituperative podcast by a Make-America-Great-Again champion that describes India and China as hellholes.

What is at stake is not the veracity of what the podcaster says about Indian immigrants to the US or the conditions in which Indians live back home. That could, at best, have figured in a debate with the podcaster, whose name, strangely enough, is Savage. There is candour there, and the possibility of disabusing him of his notions born out of racial prejudice. But when President Trump posts it on his social media account, it becomes a slur, an attack on India.

Donald Trump, as an individual, is not finest representative of humanity. Unlike the beasts of the wild engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, in which the fittest prevail, humans are potentially capable of empathy, cognition beyond what directly manifests to the five senses, appreciation and creation of beauty and culture, constant expansion of the frontiers of knowledge and conversion of that knowledge into the means of enhancing the quality of their existence. Humans have a sense of fairness and justice, an instinct for protecting the weak and capacity for enlightened self-interest that abdicates present consumption for future sustainability.

These human qualities are, of course, superimposed on the features of survival-seeking animals, which fight for territory, resent bands and groups that are not their own, even if of like species, and live and die by the rule of the jungle, that might is right.

It is does not require a genius to figure out on which set of characteristics, if a Venn diagram were to be drawn of the characteristics of humans, in general, and the characteristics of Donald Trump, there would be maximum overlap. But we do not say this to Donald Trump when we engage with him as President of the United States. He might lack the civility and the grace to conduct himself according to his station, but that would be no excuse for others, who have such civility and grace, to imitate him.

There is a United States beyond Donald Trump, and India must seek to maintain good relations with that US, and not forsake its principles of respect for sovereignty or concern for national dignity, when dealing with a man who threatens to wipe out a civilisation and jokes about dropping bombs for the Hegseth of it.

Our relations with the US have to be shaped in the context of the realignment of geopolitics that the MAGA worldview’s isolationist and imperialist articulation by President Trump has wrought. Europe is acquiring its own defence posture, fully aware that the NATO of yore no longer guards Europe. Japan has recently shed its restriction on sale of offensive weapons to outside powers. While East and Southeast Asian countries will reach an accommodation with China, they will still feel the need to ground their security in their own strength, particularly with a rogue power like North Korea around, more empowered than before, fortified by fresh infusions of Russian defence technology.

One reason why the rest of the world holds so much of US dollar assets is the US current account deficit, which has to be financed by the rest of the world. Trump wants to eliminate that current account deficit. That desire can be fulfilled only by curtailing dollar dominance.

Over the last ten year, the share of global reserves held in the dollar has come down by ten percentage points, even if still remains over half the total. The rise of gold signals the decline of the dollar. India’s timidity in responding to the attack on a fellow member of BRICS — Iran is a member since 2024 — has weakened the grouping, but not terminally. It can take the lead in forming a new currency for settling international transactions that do not involve the US as a counterparty, in cooperation with the EU, Canada and Japan, of course. Putting that currency on the blockchain would eliminate payment delays, release payments from the rickety Swift messaging system and greatly contribute to ending the US government’s ability to weaponise the dollar.

A great deal of modern exercise of power depends on technology, both of military and civilian, shaped by artificial intelligence, advances in cryptography, communications, robotics, materials, biotechnology, space technology, technologies for the desperately needed Green Transition in energy, reticular chemistry capable of producing crystalline structures with precise, tunable spaces between lattices that can be used as molecular sieves, and the like.

In the new, fragmented world, technology also fractures along national lines. Depending on American military satellites for global positioning might be not just futile but dangerous at critical moments. Buying American fighter jets is to lock the buyer into dependence on sustained support from US systems, intelligence and upgrades, jettisoning kit from other sources.

Anthropic’s latest release, Mythos, reveals the imbalance in national power between countries that can leverage AI to safeguard their systems against hacking and countries that do not have access to such AI tools to protect their systems. Technology no longer presents itself as presumed global commons. Rather, technology is a national asset, to be shared or withheld, depending on political will.

Global alliances would have to take into account national capability to develop technology, readiness to create complementary technologies and share among like-minded nations and groups of nations. Frameworks for regulation of AI and other dual use technologies can be built collegially only if nations other than the US and China have the wherewithal to make significant contributions to the technology itself.

India can potentially be a major provider of technological commons for the world, or force superpowers to add their tech to a shareable pool. That potential lies in the millions of young Indians who are of an age to receive advance training in diverse technologies and fields of the imagination, and become creators and innovators. Right now, Indians are content to slave away developing intellectual property at Global Capability Centres for foreign companies and their national governments, instead of working on projects to develop and deploy Indian capability in diverse fields.

At least on ambition, whether of Indian entrepreneurs or of the Indian government, to convert India’s potential into achievement, the Savage verdict is probably right: India does represent a deep hole, wherever it leads.

The way to sustained improvement in India’s relations with the US and other countries lies through realising India’s own innate potential for advance. That calls for participatory democracy, not sectarian politics crawling towards schism.

If you have not heard of MOOWR, and think the term probably refers to a cow’s moo turning into a growl in protest against the abuse she is being subjected to in the Indian political discourse, you can be excused. The MOOWR in question, however, is not anything remotely bovine or pastoral. It is a policy initiative by the government meant to help the noble cause of Make-in-India, which ends up ignobly harming the project of indigenous manufacture.

The finance ministry is reportedly grappling with conflicting demands from renewable energy companies that, in one case, import equipment, particularly batteries, in the normal course, and, in another case, import inputs under the Manufacture and Other Operations in Warehouse Regulations (MOOWR), 2019 scheme. Those who make use of the scheme, says the India Energy Storage Alliance, have a cashflow advantage that helps them bid lower for renewable energy contracts, in comparison with folk who import their inputs in the regular fashion.

While the heartburn of those suffering a competitive disadvantage as a result of policy-induced tilting of the playing field is perfectly understandable, and it is fair to ask what particular antacid is their appropriate remedy, the more pertinent question is whether the government should, at all, create policy that tilts the playing field against one section of Indian manufacturers vis-à-vis another section of Indian manufacturers, that, too, in the name of promoting Indian manufacture.

The MOOWR scheme allows any enterprise to treat its domestic premises as a bonded warehouse, the customs duty on imports into which has to be paid only when the finished product is shipped out. If the output is shipped abroad, the import duty can be waived altogether, as exports should not be burdened by import duties on their inputs.

The scheme creates two classes of domestic producers: a class of chumps and another class of wisenheimers. The chumps pay import duties and Integrated Goods and Services Tax (IGST) on their imported inputs upfront, carry the cost on their books, and recover it only through final sales. The wisenheimers do not pay import duty and IGST upfront on their imported inputs, and avoid the interest cost on these payments that chumps bear till these costs are recovered from the sale of output.

The scheme is particularly harmful for India’s capital goods industry: MOOWR offers Indian producers imported capital goods at zero import duty, and zero IGST on the import. This is because capital goods mostly stay put in the factory premises, which are classified as a bonded warehouse, and attract no duty if they do not stray outside the premises. The same equipment, when procured from a domestic producer, would be more expensive, at least by the extent of GST payable on it. In other words, MOOWR offers Indian producers negative protection vis-à-vis imports.

Hitherto, Indian producers have had only to complain against inverted duty structures. An inverted duty structure arises when an input faces a higher level of protection, as compared to the final output. To illustrate, consider aluminium and a window frame made out of aluminium. The import duty on aluminium is 7.5%, and that on the window frame is 10%. The window frame maker is happy. But suppose the import duty on the window frame is zero, became it comes in from a country with which India has a free trade agreement. The domestic maker of aluminium window frames will start howling about the industry being killed by an inverted duty structure: the duty on the raw material, aluminium, is 10%, but the finished product faces nil import duty.

People often make the mistake of seeing the import duties of 7.5% on aluminium and 10% on a product made out of aluminium, and conclude that aluminium products get a protection of 2.5%. This is a common mistake, but a mistake, nevertheless.

Protection, strictly speaking, is not for goods but for the value added in the making of the good in question. The effective rate of protection is the difference in value addition introduced by tariffs on the input and the output, as a proportion of the value added in the absence of tariffs.

Suppose the cost of aluminium used in the manufacture of a window frame is 80% of the price of the window frame. If the price of the window frame is P, the value added in the window frame production is P – P x 80/100 or P-0.8P, as 80/100 is 0.8. The value added is 0.2P.

If we represent the share of input cost in the final price of a good by ‘a’, instead of fixing it at 80%, we have the price of the final product as P and the cost of input as aP. Value added = P – aP or, using elementary algebra, P(1-a).

Now we introduce tariffs, t on the final good and ti,. on the input, both t and ti expressed as percentages. The absolute value of the tariff on the final good would be Pt, and the price of the final good would be P+Pt or P(1+t). The tariff element of the cost of the input would be aPti, and the cost of the input would be aP+aPti or aP(1+ti). The value added with tariffs would be P(1+t) - aP(1+ti).

The difference between the value added with tariffs and the value added without tariffs would be {P(1+t) - aP(1+ti)} – P(1-a), which works out to P{(1+t) – a(1+ti)} – P(1-a), which is the same as

P{1+t-a-ati-1+a}, or P(t-ati), +a cancelling out -a, and +1 cancelling out -1. This difference in value added with tariffs as a proportion of value added without tariffs is the effective rate of protection.

ERP= P(t-ati)/P(1-a). Cancelling out the common factor P,

ERP = t-ati/1-a

Suppose the import duty on the final good were equal to the import duty on the input, would it mean no protection for the final good? Not at all. In our equation, t and ti both become t, so that the numerator would be (t-at) or t(1-a). In the equation for ERP, (1-a) would be a common factor for both the numerator and the denominator, rendering ERP=t (1-a)/(1-a) or ERP=t. When the duty on the output is the same as the duty on the input, the effective rate of protection for converting the input into the output is at the same identical rate as the duty on input or output.

In our aluminium example, where raw aluminium gets a duty of 7.5% and window frame gets a duty of 10%, ERP would be (0.1 - 0.8 x 0.075)/(1-.8) = (.1-.06)/.2 or 20%, significantly higher than the nominal protection of 10% or the difference in duties on input and output. If the duty on window frames were to be below that on aluminium, say 5%, or 0.05, ERP would be (0.05-.8x0.075)/0.2 or (0.05-0.06)/0.2 or negative 5%.

Input duties higher than on the output make for negative protection, and input duties lower than duties on the output make for high effective rates of protection. This is why industry routinely protests against inverted duty structures.

When whole built-up capital goods are allowed to enter production entirely duty-free, and domestic producers of the same goods face duties on their inputs, they face unfair competition, with negative protection on the customs duty front, and the additional disadvantage of having to pay IGST while the import under MOOWR scheme faces no IGST either.

The government should scrap the MOOWR scheme, and stop sorting importers into chumps and wisenheimers.

After the defeat of the 131st Constitution Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha, for want of the requisite support of the two-thirds of those present and voting, the government withdrew the Delimitation Commission Bill as well, putting off reservation of legislative seats for women to that elusive dawn of consensus.

Why did the government bring up such consequential Bills without public debate, without reference to a committee of Parliament, and in a special session convened at short notice? What has the ruling side achieved, and what is the state of representative democracy in India, with the number of state-wise representatives being frozen as per the 1971 population, now that Indians have proliferated to more than two and a half times the 1971 level of 54.8 crore, at different rates in different states?

Given that the strength of the ruling alliance in the Lok Sabha, 292, is far short of the two-thirds mark of 362, and given that no effort has been made to hold all-party meetings and build consensus on the bills, getting the bills passed at short notice looked like a wild gamble at the outset. Why did the government still roll the dice?

The ruling side gets two campaign points, apart from possibly luring some active Trinamool Congress MPs to Delhi, disrupting their role in the assembly election campaign underway at present: one, it posits the ruling side as the champion of women, a powerful constituency in both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, and two, it potentially creates a rift between the Congress and its Tamil Nadu ally, the DMK, with the DMK stoutly opposing any delimitation exercise that would bring down the share of Tamil MPs in the Lok Sabha, and the Congress running the risk of being branded ‘anti-North’, were it to fully endorse the DMK.

But how did the government hold out the assurance that the proportion of seats currently held by every state would be held unchanged, even after delimitation takes place on the basis of the 2011 Census?

Delimitation is not just about fixing the number of Parliament seats in each state, but also about redrawing the boundaries of assembly and Parliament constituencies. If the most recent Census data is used for allocating the number of seats among states, there is no way the present proportions among states can be retained in the enlarged Lok Sabha, and it would be extremely impolitic for the Home Minister to assert that the extant proportion of statewise allocation of Lok Sabha seats would be retained. So, how are fresh boundaries to be drawn for territorial constituencies, while maintaining extant proportion of seats among states?

The Delimitation Commission would have to use different Census figures for allocating the enlarged number of seats proposed among the states, and for re-engineering constituency boundaries. Extant proportions can be preserved by continuing to use the 1971 population for allocation of seats among the states. Constituency rejigging can be done on the basis of the 2011 Census figures.

The 131st Constitution Amendment Bill makes this possible. It seeks to replace the provision in Article 81, calling for the most recent Census figures to be used for allocation of total Lok Sabha seats among states, with the provision that the Census to be used would be the Census specified by Parliament. “…the expression “population” means the population as ascertained at such census, as Parliament may by law determine, of which the relevant figures have been published.’ All the government would need to do is to specify that the Census to be relied on under Article 81 is the Census of 1971, this time around.

But can the Delimitation Commission then use Census 2011 figures for redrawing constituency boundaries? It can. In fact, the present constituency boundaries have been drawn on the basis of the 2001 Census, even as distribution of seats among the states has been done on the basis of the 1971 Census, enabled by a prior Constitution amendment.

But how do we reflect, in the days to come, the changes in population proportions among states since 1971 without making South Indian states feel they are being penalized for having stabilized their population through social development, even as North Indian states that failed in their development mandate are rewarded with greater decisionmaking power in Parliament?

I have addressed this question in detail in an article written in March 2025 (http://bit.ly/4chZ9WS). Equality of franchise across states is, of course, a prime consideration. But so is federal cohesion in India’s diverse, quasi-federal polity. Large polities go not just by the equality of franchise among constituents, but also by the need to maintain federal cohesion among big and large units.

In the US, all states have just two members in the powerful Senate, however big or small the state might be. While the number of Representatives elected from each state to the House of Representatives is determined by the state’s share in total US population, the share of each state in the totality of the electoral college votes that determine who becomes President is weighted to privilege the smaller states at the expense of the larger ones. The number of electoral college votes for each state is the size of their Congressional delegation, meaning number of House members and number of Senate members from the state. Since the number of Senate members is 2 for all states, this arrangement dampens the extent to which population alone determines a state’s role in electing the nation’s chief executive.

The European Union determines the size of each member state’s contingent to the European Parliament based on a principle they call degressive proportionality. Here, degressive stands for the opposite of progressive in ‘progressive taxation.’ European MPs from smaller states would exceed, and their counterparts from larger states, trail their respective shares in the total EU population.

India already puts this principle in practice, when the per capita number of MPs from tiny states like the Lakshadwip, the Northeastern states, and Goa greatly exceeds the number of MPs per capita from the major states.

To what extent degressive proportionality should dampen the population-size difference created by differential development in different parts of the country should be debated by the polity, and a consensus reached, before the next delimitation exercise is carried out.

The quest for principled solutions, rather than short-term political expedience, should guide lawmaking.

The Iran war will accelerate the decline of the US and the rise of China. It will force Europe to kick the habit of holding on to Uncle Sam’s coat tails and grow up fast. It will speed up the ongoing shift of nations towards energy security, read freedom from imported fossil fuels and embrace of electricity for mobility, cooking and heating. Trump’s fond baby will be left holding her drill, as the world switches decisively to renewable, geothermal and nuclear energy.

Trump plays many roles, willingly, like that of Jesus Christ healing the sick, and unwillingly, such as validator of one of Vladimir Lenin’s sayings, that there are decades in which nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. In the 66 weeks since he took office, Trump has made decades happen.

His tariff war has destroyed goodwill across the globe. His illiterate rejection of climate change, withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, steep cuts to foreign aid and threat to end the Iranian civilization have exposed not just him but also the country he leads as a malign power that preys on the weak and knows neither scruple nor principle. Pax Americana lies as part of the rubble in Gaza and Tehran.

The Middle East will change. Dubai might regain its role as a hub of global aviation. But it cannot regain its status as a refuge for the world’s billionaires fleeing taxes, rivalling Singapore, Cypress and Monaco. Security can no longer be taken for granted. The Saudi dreams for its new city in the desert now have moved farther away from reality.

This is assuming that Iran comes out of the war intact as a nation. If the US manages to do what the western powers did to Libya, that is, strip it of central authority and national cohesion, the entire region would be caught up in the chaos. The monarchies of the Gulf are not stable monoliths and can well unravel the way Iraq had for some time after Saddam Hussain.

War-induced panic in the financial markets reversed the flow of assets out of the dollar, and into gold and other commodities. But this is likely to last only as long as the war. Once that is over, assets would redeploy ever more out of the dollar. Trump does not want a current account deficit, which is what draws external savings into the US economy, and leaves America’s lenders holding US government bonds and other dollar-denominated assets.

However, Trump’s policies are widening the fiscal deficit, and if Trump manages to curtail the American current account deficit by weakening the dollar to make imports dearer for Americans, American savings would bear a larger chunk of the US government’s debt. Compression of the current account deficit means reduced inflow of foreign capital, and, assuming the demand for capital to invest in Artificial Intelligence infrastructure and power would continue unabated, interest rates would rise.

The dollar would become more volatile than it is today, reducing its appeal as a haven currency. As it is, forex holdings in the dollar have come down from 65% of the global total in 2015 to some 57% by the last quarter of 2025. Several countries, such as China and India have increased their holdings of gold.

The Iran war has diluted the inclination of the oil and gas majors of the Persian Gulf to trade their fuels in dollars. The US could not prevent Iran from attacking the countries that played host to US forces. The US could not prevent Israel from attacking Qatar, either, and has only told Netanyahu to keep his bombing of Lebanon low-key. The US keeps shouting it does not need oil coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. Why should the Gulf nations continue to price their oil and gas in dollars, when they sell to China, India or Japan?

They have plenty to import from China, and can use the yuan they take for selling oil to pay for these imports. Ditto for yen and Japan. The region has muscle memory of transacting with the rupee, harking back to an imperial past when Britain had placed its West Asian territories under the Bombay Presidency.

This is the ideal time for the BRICS to launch, in consultation with Canada and the EU, a currency on the blockchain, a stablecoin pegged to the IMF’s unit of account, the SDR, with all participating currencies holding reserves of the currencies, the basket of which the IMF uses to value the SDR, in the right proportions and quantities that would satisfy Trump’s Genius Act for stablecoins in the US.

What would India get from such an arrangement? The Indian rupee is not part of the SDR basket. What India would get is escape from dollar hegemony and dollar sanctions and secondary sanctions, once the new stablecoin goes mainstream as the currency in which to settle trades that do not involve the US as a counterparty. The stablecoin could be called Bancor, to honour Keynes, who had proposed such an alternative to the dollar while setting up the Bretton Woods institutions. Ending the ability of the US to weaponize the dollar is gain enough.

But will BRICS grab this opportunity? India chairs the BRICS this year, and could not even muster the courage to condemn the US when it bombed a fellow BRICS member, Iran.

China will present itself to the world not just as a stable, responsible superpower, in sharp contrast to the US, but also as the leading provider of everything electric, from technology to equipment, from power electronics to electric vehicles, from solar photovoltaic to solar thermal solutions.

India should probably ask the Americans to look for its lost strategic autonomy, if and when they search Iranian debris to retrieve a pile of enriched uranium.

In the end, Hungary’s Viktor Orban quietly conceded defeat and congratulated the opponent who has trounced him. He did not rig the electoral rolls, did not howl about stolen elections and lead partisans to storm the country’s legislative buildings to try and foil official acknowledgement of his electoral defeat, did not file umpteen suits in the courts he controlled to try and block the election result. Was he really the archetypal illiberal democrat he has been portrayed to be? Should we even discuss the change of guard in a small country of less than one crore people, and GDP of some $248 billion?

We should. He did not become the face of the politics of religious-nationalist populism that has been gaining ground in the West for nothing. He has been in power for 16 years. He rejected the European Union’s calls to accommodate the refugees fleeing the Arab Spring’s violent suppression and dissipation. He established legislative control over the judiciary, leaving the European Union fuming over institutional failure, and withholding funds meant for Hungarian development. He encouraged his rich friends to buy out media outlets, so that the mainstream media discourse in the country was uncritically supportive of his government and hostile to the Opposition. The Opposition accuses him of crony capitalism and supporting a system of corruption.

He leveraged the European Union’s requirement of consensus in decision-making to put a halt to major policy initiatives by the Union, such as extending a hefty $90 billion loan to Ukraine. He made common cause with the EU’s bete noire, Vladimir Putin of Russia, on Russian hydrocarbons, and against Ukraine, played host to Chinese investment in electric car production at a time when the European automobile industry was trying to keep the low-cost Chinese electric vehicles at bay.

He has been the poster boy of radical conservative politics, indeed, of electoral autocracy, acknowledged forerunner of the rise of the far right in Germany, France, and, now, Britain, star speaker at America’s major conservative political event, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again base loves him, Vice-President JD Vance travelled to Hungary to speak in support of his ideological comrade during the Hungarian election campaign. That is not interference in some other country’s internal affairs, of course not.

Yet, Orban has bitten the dust. A former colleague and functionary of his Fidesz party, Peter Magyar, and his newly formed Tisza party, have won a two-thirds majority in the elections to the Hungarian Parliament. The politics of Hungary has not turned any shade of rosy pink. It remains firmly centre-right, for all the parties to be elected to Parliament. Yet, Budapest’s young and old are partying on the banks of the river that runs through the city and Hungary’s history, and dancing to tunes more lively than ‘the Blue Danube’.

What lessons does Orban’s fall hold for the rest of the world?

For the EU, it means smoother internal functioning, smoother functioning, with less blocking of aid to Ukraine and reduced enthusiasm for things Russian. For Hungary, this could pave the way for unblocking funds that the EU had held back, on account of concerns over judicial independence and corruption under Orban.

For Europe and America, a political cycle seems to be turning. The electoral gains of the ultra-rightwing AfD in Germany, the rise of the National Rally in France, where its candidate is the favourite to lead in the presidential polls next year, and the rising popularity of Nigel Farrage-led Reform UK in Britain, and the Second Coming of Donald Trump in the US have seemed to signal an unstoppable tide of rightwing populism across the West. Orban’s rout in Hungary changes the narrative in a way the National Rally’s relatively anaemic showing in France’s recent municipal elections had not.

What does Orban’s defeat mean for India? No one’s grip on power is absolute — that is one clear lesson. It took 16 years for the strongman’s charisma to lose its hold on Hungary’s majority, but finally, it did. While the people of Budapest were never in his thrall, more socially conservative rural Hungary endorsed his Christian values and his loud promise to defend Christendom against Muslim barbarians flooding in as refugees.

It took a charismatic leader to rally the dispirited opposition into a coherent force that could dislodge Orban. What really undid Orban was corruption. Initially, Orban held power. Then, he held absolute power, with the power to amend the Constitution and give his party control over the judiciary and the media as well. Power corrupts. Absolute power does an absolute job.

In India, tribal rights are being trampled and stomped into the soft duff of the forest floor. Environmental and forest clearances have been converted into rituals that must be observed to appease dermatic piety, with any significance only in the rare case of judicial intervention. The media is quiescent, as India steadily goes down on all global indices of press freedom and adherence to democracy. It helps that advertising is fragmenting, deserting the mainstream media and rushing to occupy new nooks, crannies and sermonising mounts of the expanding digital world, making mainstream media susceptible to the allure of state advertising, amidst a culture of personality in which every satrap of every department and government agency, as well as of every state, competes to project the visage of the Great Leader in full-page advertisements and sponsored events.

India’s diversity is a source of rare vigour, when coherent. It is also, like the densely packed nucleus of an element with an elevated atomic number, readily fissile, when bombarded with external excitation. Sectarian passions are easy to whip up, along multiple identity lines that are also faultlines across national unity.

State power has been used arbitrarily since colonial times. The culture of the administration has never really moved from one of containing and controlling a subject population, with carrot and lathi. Carrots have evolved and turned digital. Coercion permeates the system, instead of being visible as a stick.

India, at the moment, lacks a national Opposition that projects an alternative narrative of collective, united advance. The existing Opposition can only find fault and lay blame, not offer solutions to problems that crush the people and provoke what has been called a million mutinies. And there is no Peter Magyar around with an effective social media game.

Yet, it is good to know that long-entrenched leaders can fall, that no one’s grip on power is absolute, that electoral autocracy can depose its despot, even without an insurrection.

There is a line of thought which holds that the forthcoming assembly elections in Keralam would be existential for the state’s Communists. If they lose, they would be marginalized as their counterparts were in West Bengal and Tripura, after losing elections in these erstwhile Left bastions. The BJP has emerged as a principal political presence in these states, displacing the CPI(M).

This kind of reasoning is a little too facile. Even if the Communist-led Left Democratic Front loses in the elections scheduled for April 9, it will remain a vibrant political force, perhaps even emerge stronger, rid as it would be of the flotsam dragged along in the wake of power. There is a good reason why Kerala would be different from West Bengal and Tripura.

The Communist movement in Keralam democratized Malayali society, to the extent possible while the caste system survives and religion-based mobilization thrives in the larger, national polity. The Communists organised practically all sections of society, industrial workers, workers in traditional occupations such as spinning coir out of the fibre of coconut husk, agricultural workers, tenant farmers, students, teachers, civil servants.

The Communists carried out land reforms, bringing in legislation when they held office for two brief years over 1957-59, and then mobilising people on the ground and agitating to get the land ceiling enforced, to turn tenants into owner-cultivators, and distribute surplus land.

Kerala’s Communists came out of the Congress Socialist Party, and it was in their political DNA to work among the people, awaken their sense of self-worth and entitlement to human dignity. The redistribution of wealth and associated social and economic power that came about with land reforms helped the Communists mobilise people not as dumb masses but as individuals aware of their democratic rights and determined to organise, to use collective strength to secure those rights practice.

Such was the power of this political agenda that all other political parties of the state were forced to accept it as their own, after initial revolt and rebellion, and eventually compete with the Communists to organise people to secure and exercise their democratic rights. The Congress, its breakaway factions, the Kerala Congress, the Indian Union Muslim League, all share the socio-political convictions of the Communists as regards democratic dignity of the people and secularism being integral to democratic politics, rather than a standalone virtue to be flaunted to attract religious minorities and demonstrated by appeasing the most conservative urges among the minorities.

The Communists also carried forward the dynamic of social reform started in the decades of the late 19th and the early 20 century, with particular emphasis on mass education. Democratic awakening meant that people demanded better healthcare, road connectivity, access to clean drinking water and other amenities.

All this was unique to Keralam. The Communists had not hegemonized the social agenda in either West Bengal or Tripura, as they had in Kerala. It is true that the Communists implemented tenancy reform in West Bengal as well. However, by and large, the Communists played patronage politics in West Bengal and Tripura. If the people stayed with the Communists, their government would look after them — this was the bargain.

Politics in Kerala is like a football match. Both sides play the same game, each side has vociferous fan following and cheerleaders, one side wins, the other loses, but the game itself remains firmly entrenched in the people’s minds. The Sangh Parivar and radical Islamists play a different game, and inveigle people into it, with modest success.

Yet, there is one big difference between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the Communist-led Left Democratic Front. The state’s religious minorities are more aligned with the UDF than with the LDF. Muslims have allegiance to the Muslim League and to the Congress, Christians to the Congress and assorted factions of the Kerala Congress.

If the Congress were to lose the assembly elections for a third time in a row, the minorities might be tempted to desert the Congress. In the face of the growing assault on minority rights from the Sangh Parivar across India, Kerala’s minorities also need protection. They might either turn to the Left for defence of their rights, or even try to make peace with the Sangh Parivar. Even many Congressmen might be tempted to desert a party led by a witless wonder who refuses to take accountability for leadership failure time and again. This would result in effective disbanding of the UDF, even if the Congress does survive as a truncated force.

Defeat in the forthcoming elections would be an existential threat for the UDF, but not for the LDF. Were the LDF to lose, it would continue to champion the state’s common democratic agenda as the Opposition. It could also cleanse itself of some of the corrupting influences of power, and emerge stronger, to fight the next electoral battle with greater vigour.

After threatening Iran with total destruction — “A civilization will die tonight,” said a post by President Trump on Truth Social, the social media site he owns — making use of profanities and curse words, Trump has declared a two-week ceasefire in the US-Israeli war on Iran. The ceasefire announcement resulted from peace talks mediated by Pakistan in Islamabad, where further discussions are expected to take place, with US Vice-President JD Vance expected to lead his country’s delegation.

Trump’s threat to wipe out a civilization — did he mean that he would nuke Iran, it is legitimate to ask — and to destroy bridges, power plants and desalination plants amount to open plans to commit war crimes. Trump comes across as being unhinged, and there is talk in Washington DC of the need to strip him of office, on grounds of incapacity — the US Constitution provides for such contingencies — and let the Vice-President assumes the Presidency.

Pope Leo XIV, the UN Secretary General and the French foreign minister have criticized Trump’s comments. New Delhi, of course, continues to behave as if studied silence is the best foreign policy, never mind that India leads the BRICS grouping this year and is a self-avowed champion of the Global South. It is strange leadership of the Global South for India to stay mute when the leader of the most powerful nation on earth threatens a fellow developing country with annihilation.

The ceasefire threatens to unravel, thanks to continuing attacks by Israel on Lebanon, from where Iran’s ally Hezbollah, a Shia militia-plus-political outfit funded and armed by Iran, has fired rockets at Israel. Israel has already occupied a portion of Southern Lebanon south of the Litani river, and has been bombing the Capital, Beirut. More than 250 people have been killed, and thousands injured.

Iran insists, with backing from Pakistan, that the ceasefire covers Lebanon as well, and that it would consider the US and Israel to be in breach, if Israel continues to attack Lebanon. Israel and the US maintain that Lebanon was not part of the deal. Tense negotiations continue, amidst continuing hostilities and the world watches to see if the Strait of Hormuz is open for navigation. Iran, reportedly, is allowing oil tankers to pass through the Strait, charging tankers one dollar per barrel of oil transported.

The larger classes of crude carriers have the capacity to carry anything from 345,000 barrels to one million barrels of oil. In the normal course, 20 million barrels of oil or thereabouts passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That many dollars a day is what Iran proposes to collect as toll for letting ships pass through the Strait. It would be a surprise if the US does not see this also as violation of the ceasefire.

Memorial for a rat in Cambodia

Meanwhile, Cambodia has honoured a dead rat with a memorial statue. Cambodia, of course, is part of the Southeast Asian regions that Indian cultural influence had filled with Hindu customs and idols. But this particular rat had nothing to with the animal that served as elephant god Ganesha’s transport. The Rat is Magawa, and he is celebrated for having detected and helped eliminate 100 landmines across Cambodia.

Cambodia is the world capital of amputees, whose limbs were blown up by landmines. The laying of mines started with Americans chasing the Vietcong into their Cambodian hideout, and ended with attempts to stop the murderous Khmer Rouge, routed from power, staging guerrilla forays from neighbouring Thaliand. The US Air Force had dropped 2.7 million tonnes of bombs over Cambodia, without acknowledging the fact, over 14 months starting March 1969. Officially, US attacks were restricted to Vietnam.

Trump’s imperial attitude towards Iran harks back to another chapter of US history, in which the world’s mightiest military treated southeast Asians like expendable lab mice, who could be sacrificed for the pursuit of noble geopolitical goals. Magawa stands as a metaphor for the worth White Supremacists see in lesser people, and for nature’s potential to redress human excess.

Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor goes critical

The second stage of what the father of India’s atomic energy mission, Homi J Bhabha, had envisaged as a three-stage programme finally got underway at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu. Bhabha’s vision for indigenous atomic energy was based on the scarcity of uranium and the plentiful availability of Thorium in the monazite sands of coastal South India. Thorium, Uranium and Plutonium are all actinides, a group of heavy, radioactive chemicals.

With Canadian help, which dried up after the 1974 Pokhran nuclear test, India perfected the technology for pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs). When uranium undergoes fission inside a nuclear fission reactor, that is, splits up into lighter elements, some mass is converted into energy at the rate described by Einstein, E=mc2. Assorted particles charge around at great speed, as the strong nuclear force that binds particles together inside an atom is overcome by the energy induced inside a uranium atom that absorbs a free neutron hitting it at high speed, allowing the electromagnetic repulsion between two positively charged protons to take over, and send particles flying apart at great speed, the kinetic energy creating the heat inside the reactor, which is used to boil water into steam and drive turbines.

Heavy water is formed by two atoms of heavy hydrogen, deuterium, combining with one atom of oxygen. Heavy water is used in PHWRs both as a coolant and as the medium that moderates the speed of the particles. The speed must be sufficient to sustain fission. Each fission must induce, on average, another fission — that is criticality. If each fission, on average, produces less than one additional fission, the process would fizzle out, making for sub-criticality. Supercriticality is when each fission on average creates more than one fission, sending the reactor into uncontrollable overdrive.

Some uranium atoms that gain a neutron inside the reactor undergo what scientists call beta decay, meaning the neutron loses an electron, becoming a proton. When the number of protons inside Uranium goes up from 92 to 93, it become another element, Neptunium. Neptunium is unstable, and swiftly absorbs another neutron, which loses its electron to become a proton, so that the atom’s atomic number now becomes 94, that is, it becomes Plutonium.

This plutonium is highly toxic and radioactive. It should be recovered from the fission reactor’s spent fuel, to make it more amenable to easy disposal. What od you do with the Plutonium. Of course, it can be used for making bombs. Or it can be used, as its oxide, along with an oxide of Uranium, in the Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel for the second stage reactor.

The Plutonium and Uranium oxides produce energy, as in a normal reactor, but around the core, a blanket of natural or depleted uranium is kept. Neutrons from the core bombard the Uranium in the blanket and convert it into more plutonium. The second stage reactor, in other words, makes use of Plutonium from the spent fuel of the first stage, to breed yet more plutonium. This is why this is called a breeder reactor.

When sufficient quantities of Plutonium has been bred in this fashion, the stage is set for the third stage. In this blanket is made of Thorium, recovered from monazite. Thorium’s atomic number is 90. When it is bombarded with high-speed neutrons inside the reactor, it absorbs neutrons, which undergo beta decay and become protons. When it acquires two protons, the Thorium becomes highly fissile Uranium. This Uranium is now ready to be used as fuel in the Stage 1 PHWR.

Thus the second stage fast breeder reactor sets the stage for self-reliance on reactor fuel, without having to import Uranium, although, thanks to the quasi-membership of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group that India has gained, thanks to the Indo-US nuclear deal, India can import Uranium. Import dependence, however, is a vulnerability, as missing natural gas and crude oil supplies from the war-struck Persian Gulf demonstrate.