-Livemint.com Politics in India has been based on caste in recent decades. But a rising middle class and increasing inequality within caste groups is paving the way for a class-based faultline. One cliché looms large in every election campaign in India: that caste politics may finally give way to class politics. But as counting begins on the day of the election verdict, caste subsumes every other factor, even in serious analyses of...

-Newsclick.in The results show how strong the pull of caste identity is. Nothing else explains why JD-U’s vote share did not shrink disastrously. The Bihar Assembly elections turned out to be a breathlessly close race, with the National Democratic Alliance pipping the Mahagathbandhan or Grand Alliance to the post. Yet the award for man of the match must go to Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav, who took on the combined might...

-Newslaundry.com It’s a repository of public datasets on Indian agriculture and socioeconomic indicators and, going forward, on financial inclusion and rural development. Data, they say, is the new oil. It undergirds much of the modern economy and, increasingly, the Polity. There’s hardly a socioeconomic sector that big data doesn’t drive today, from the cutting edge of scientific research and technology to the mundane chore of buying groceries. The sheer volume of...

-Hindustan Times Indian democracy is robust. The balance is good for the Polity The Jharkhand election, in which a coalition of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-Congress-Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has succeeded in dislodging the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, is a reflection of a broader pattern in national politics. For one, it shows, yet again, that the BJP is vulnerable at the state level — and Narendra Modi’s popularity at the...

-The Hindu Former PM Manmohan Singh says change undermines federal Polity New Delhi: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday remarked that the Centre ought to have consulted the State governments before introducing additional terms of reference for the 15th Finance Commission seeking to create separate funds for Defence and Internal Security. Asserting that unilateralism was not good for a federal Polity and cooperative federalism, Mr. Singh said the best course would have...