-TheWire.in As Rohingyas in India face rising Islamophobia, a strong tide of Hindu Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, the view that fires in refugees camps are due to accidents is rather unconvincing. Rohingya refugee camps in India witnessed four fires in 2021 alone, higher than any other year prior. Between 2016 and 2021, 12 mysterious fires broke out in Rohingya camps alone. Most of these conflagrations demonstrated a peculiar trend – they catalyse...

-The Telegraph Christophe Jaffrelot says 'minorities are second class citizens', and authoritarianism risks reaching a 'point of no return' in the country London: A French scholar who has studied Narendra Modi’s politics and policies over the past 20 years has just published a 639-page book on the Prime Minister in which he predicts that India’s transformation into an ethnic democracy, “where minorities are second class citizens”, and authoritarianism risks reaching a “point...

-NDTV.com Two BJP chief ministers, UP's Yogi Adityanath and Assam's Himanta Biswa Sarma, both of them young by the standards of Indian politics, do not owe their political strength to either Narendra Modi or the RSS. As chief mahant or priest of Gorakhpur's influential religious math and as head of Gorakhpur's Hindu Vahini (a youth organization run in his name), 49-year-old Adityanath was championing Hindu Nationalism independently of the BJP far...

-TheWire.in A three to six-month fiscal plan has to be chalked out to make vaccines and drugs available to people of all ages across the states by bringing in the private sector. An income support scheme has to be rolled out for nine months at least. India reported a new high of 2 lakh fresh coronavirus positive cases for the first time last week, and the last few days continue to see...

-The Hindu Mamata Banerjee’s assumption that Bengali Nationalism could block anti-incumbency and Hindutva may be optimistic The Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in West Bengal is a unique specimen in understanding anti-incumbency. Welfare schemes that usually make incumbents popular have added to the anti-incumbency woes of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, as the workers of her party made those the easy and only option for rent-seeking. ‘Cut money’, or the cut for TMC local...