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Three Temple-Mosque disputes in Uttar Pradesh will keep the communal politics alive in the months to come before May 2027, when the state will be going to polls. These are Kashi Vishwanath-Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi, Sri Krishna Janmaboomi-ShahiIdgah Mosque in Mathura, and the Sambhal Mosque disputes, in which both the Hindu and Muslim litigants have rejected the Supreme Court’s proposed mediated settlement.

Weaponisation of the governance and criminalisation of the cultural ethos are fast taking a diabolical character in Bengal in the last two months of BJP rule in the state.. The actions of the state government and the daily policy announcements of the Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari suggest that the BJP government is out to eliminate any amount of dissent and neutralize any opposition to the state government.

If aliens landed in India tomorrow, they would conclude they had arrived in two countries occupying the same piece of real estate. In one India, a vegetable vendor accepts payment through a QR code, a farmer checks monsoon forecasts on his smartphone, a surgeon in Chennai remotely advises a patient in Arunachal Pradesh, and a software engineer writes artificial intelligence code for California before breakfast.

Ten months after toppling one government, Nepal's Gen Z is confronting the one it built. A brutal eviction drive, a driver's self-immolation and a widening crackdown on dissent are testing whether Balen Shah's "new politics" differs from the old.

Hema Malini is in her late 70s and looks like she is just 45 years old. She has not lost a bit of her stunning beauty or stature or looks. She is still the dream girl of Bollywood and over the weekend she celebrated 60 years in a brutually fierce and competitive film industry dominated by the Kapoors and other film flam families for over 4 decades since she took a bow in the late 60s with her maiden venture Sapno ka Saudagar.

Women have been at the forefront of Indian politics since the freedom struggle. Yet, their participation in governance and representation in legislatures and other decision-making institutions remains disproportionately low. Women currently hold only about 14 per cent of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, while their average representation in state legislatures is around 9 per cent. Women remain underrepresented because access to electoral candidature is unequal and largely controlled by political party committees with limited representation of women. This persistent democratic deficit has led women’s groups and prominent women politicians to advocate consistently for reservations for women in legislatures as a means of expanding their political representation. For the past five decades, this demand has remained as the central focus of their political mobilisation and advocacy, yet it has not been implemented.

Union government in the Ministry of Information Technology & Electronics has taken up an exercise to ban social media access to children below 16 years, encouraged by Australia’s and some other countries’ experiment to this effect. If this proposal is introduced in India, there will be built-in algorithm (age assurance technology), which will prevent any cheating of age by the user children in line with the Australian operation system. The proposal aims to protect under 16-year age youth mental health, reduce exposure to harmful content, and ease parental pressure. Detailed insights are being worked out in keeping with the provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 as amended to date and other laws and regulatory measures.

The Supreme Court vacation bench’s observation that the “heavens are not going to fall” if petitions seeking an independent investigation into the alleged misappropriation of donations to the Ayodhya Ram Temple waited for the regular judicial process was an unfortunate choice of words. The bench may have been procedurally justified in declining an urgent hearing, but its rhetorical dismissal failed to recognise the extraordinary moral, institutional and political dimensions of the controversy.

Unemployment rate in million-plus cities is higher under the usual status at 4.9 per cent compared to 4.8 per cent in urban India, while stark inequality in earnings also persists among various categories – such as casual and regular wage workers within, and in comparison to both areas.

For decades, the Strait of Hormuz has been treated as a narrow stretch of water with outsized geopolitical importance. Yet the latest regional security shocks have exposed a deeper reality. Hormuz is not simply an oil chokepoint; it is the foundation upon which the modern economies of the Gulf were built. Every major disruption—whether military confrontation, sanctions, or maritime tension—reminds Gulf leaders that their prosperity depends on a maritime passage they neither fully control nor can easily replace.