Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated Just for You

We sifted through the papers to find the best opinion reads, so you won't have to.

The best opinion pieces from across newspapers this Sunday, curated just for you.

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Up the Down Staircase

In his weekly column for The Indian Express, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram argues that Prime Minister Modi's effusive praise of Trump's 20-point "Peace Plan" to end the Israel-Hamas conflict reflects weak diplomacy and a misjudgment that could undermine India’s strategic interests.

"The intriguing question is why did the Prime Minister of India jump to praise Mr Trump using the opportunity of an Israel-backed ‘peace plan’ that leaves Palestinians in despair...Apparently, for all the vain boasts, the prime minister has realised that India has few friends in the world and the Indian economy is not resilient enough to weather the storms raging around it. Flattery is no substitute for smart diplomacy and sound trade and investment policies."

P Chidambaram, Indian Express

With New Great Game, India Must Engage With the Taliban and Kabul

In the Indian Express, former diplomat Vivek Katju argues that India must pragmatically engage with the Taliban, reopening its mission in Kabul without prematurely granting diplomatic recognition, to safeguard its interests in a shifting Western neighbourhood.

"Jaishankar implied that, for the time being, a chargé d’affaires would be appointed. This indicates that India does not want to give a signal that it is diplomatically recognising the Taliban till there is a consensus in the international community to do so. This is the correct approach," he writes.

"While it may disappoint the Taliban, it will ensure that it does not ruffle feathers in Washington that India has joined the Moscow-Beijing camp on Afghanistan. It is necessary to signal this especially as India had joined the consensus at the recent Moscow meeting that no country should have military structures in Afghanistan. Soon, India should state that it is for the Taliban to decide their country’s security policies and foreign relations and no one else. If India reopens its embassy in Kabul, it would have to allow the Taliban to control the Afghan embassy in Delhi sooner rather than later. That would also imply that it would fly the flag of the Afghan emirate."

Vivek Katju, Indian Express

COP30, Belem: The World Can't Let Critical Minerals Go the Oil Way

In the lead-up to COP30, Arunabha Ghosh writes in the Hindustan Times that nations must move away from competing over rare earths and critical minerals to fostering global cooperation, ensuring they do not repeat the mistakes of the oil and gas era.

"For companies facing huge capital expenses to prospect and develop mines, minerals come with a premium on policy clarity, price consistency and opportunities for collaboration and risk-sharing. In short, a critical mineral means different things to different constituencies. What is common, as the Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Japan recognised, is the transformative role these minerals play in critical and emerging technologies. Energy transition must be fair, equitable and just, leaving nobody behind. The governance of critical minerals must evolve in response to this context."

Arunabha Ghosh, Hindustan TImes

Lalu’s PM Dreams and a Phone Call With I K Gujral

In his piece for The Indian Express, Vikas Pathak revisits the dramatic political events of 1996 that ended Lalu Prasad Yadav’s chief ministership, derailed his prime ministerial ambitions, and led to the birth of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).

Drawing from Journalist Amarendra Kumar's upcoming book Neele Aakash Ka Sach, Pathak traces how the fodder scam hindered Lalu’s rise and reshaped Bihar’s political landscape.

"The 1996 Lok Sabha elections — held in April and May, a few months after the fodder scandal came to light — threw up a fractured verdict. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government lasted merely 13 days and he lost the vote of confidence. But the fodder scam meant Lalu had lost his chance. Instead, H D Deve Gowda became Prime Minister. The CBI inquiry into the fodder scam that Vajpayee ordered continued under Deve Gowda, Lalu’s colleague in the Janata Dal who did not quite like him. It’s a move that Lalu didn’t take too kindly to. Kumar writes that it was Lalu who was responsible for the replacement of Deve Gowda with I K Gujral on April 21, 1997, miffed as he was on the CBI probe going on in full swing."

Vikas Pathak, The Indian Express

AI Could Have Been One of These Things First

Writing for Deccan Herald, Aakash Singh Rathore warns that by 2030, AI could erase nearly all new jobs, a dire prospect for India’s youth already facing high unemployment.

Rathore urges that urgent dialogue and policy is needed to steer artificial intelligence toward inclusive progress rather than mass displacement.

"Imagine the world in 2030, where 99 per cent of new job openings have vanished to AI. Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety researcher, outlines this grim possibility: superintelligent systems take over everything from coding to caregiving, leaving universal basic income (UBI) as the only lifeline amid mass despair. For India’s 500 million youth (15-29) already facing 15 percent unemployment, this isn’t abstract. It’s a ticking time bomb on entry-level roles in data entry and customer service, already down 15 percent amid AI adoption – expect 45 percent of software engineering jobs to soon be impacted."

Aakash Singh Rathore, Deccan Herald

MF Husain: Man and Myth, Art and Artist

Ahead of the launch of the world’s first and largest MF Husain museum in Doha, journalist Karan Thapar writes in the Hindustan Times that India, Husain’s birthplace and the country that once forced him into exile, has failed to properly honour one of its most celebrated modern artists.

"We should have been proud to own him. Indeed, to boast of him. Not turn our back and pretend we’ve forgotten him," he writes.

"Those who recognise good art need no introduction to Husain Sahab. Let me, instead, tell you about his character and the life he led. It’s the stuff fables are made of. For a start, Husain Sahab created his own birthday. He wasn’t exactly sure when he was born. Not just the date but even the year. So when he needed to apply for a passport he made it up. As he told me, he’d just seen the film, Come September and decided September was the month he would choose. He then hit upon 17 as the date, calling it “sweet 17”. The year he chose was 1915. But he added “I could be two years younger or two years older. Husain Sahab said he was born into “a very middle-class family in Maharashtra”. His father was a time-keeper in a textile mill and later an accountant. His grandfather was a tinsmith. Their home had no electricity. His father used to study under the light of street lamps. “That’s why in my paintings you will notice the significance of the lamp. Light is always there."

Karan Thapar, Hindustan Times

Will Nitish’s Last-minute Largesse Pay or Backfire?

In the Deccan Chronicle, Pavan K Varma argues that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Rs 2,100 crore cash handouts (Rs 10,000 each to 21 lakh women under the Mukhya Mantri Mahila Udyami Yojana) just an hour before the Bihar Assembly election dates were announced, violate the spirit of the Model Code of Conduct and risk undermining fair elections, even if they are not strictly illegal.

"In fact, to my mind, the blunt truth is that it is an open act of bribery," he writes.

"Prime Minister Modi has condemned such “revdis”. According to him, such measures are detrimental to the economy; they are unethical; they masquerade as “welfarism” but are pure opportunism draining the treasury. But now he is a party through his own “double engine” sarkar in blatantly resorting to it. This is doubly unfortunate because rulers in both Patna and Delhi know that the state budget lacks the fundamentals to implement this financial profligacy. The Bihar government has borrowed over four lakh crores already. Only the interest on this amounts to Rs 63 crores a day!"

Pavan K Varma, Deccan Chronicle

Blurring Lines Between Public and Private

In her piece for The New Indian Express, Anuradha Goyal explores how the rise of digital identities is blurring the lines between public and private spaces, leading to confusion and conflicts.

Goyal also discusses the challenges faced by different generations in navigating this shift, highlighting the impact of technology on personal interactions and the potential consequences of oversharing in the digital age.

"When my parents' generation decided to join Facebook, it took a lot of effort to convince them that not everyone on social media is your friend. Not every link is to be clicked, not every friend request to be accepted and, most importantly, not to treat the social media wall as your drawing room and say anything you feel like saying. Their naivety is rooted in the simpler times they lived, when one could judge people by looks. Hospitality rules they followed meant being cordial to anyone who came in touch. It was not an easy transition from the real world to the virtual one. We need to keep a hawk-eye on them with UPI apps installed on their phones. At the other end of the spectrum, youngsters born in the internet era hardly know how to interact in the real world. Their world view comes from their screens. They prefer to text you even when you are sitting across the table. They cannot think of any activity or action without an app. Their distance from the real world as well as their immersion in the digital world is something my generation tries to understand with limited success."

Anuradha Goyal, The New Indian Express

Targeting The Ugly Indian: New India Myth Justified?

Writing for the Deccan Chronicle, Ranjona Banerji examines the phenomenon of the "Ugly Indian" amid the recent surge of videos, images, and online discourse highlighting instances of Indians "misbehaving" abroad.

"Indian tourists are increasingly unwelcome in different places, because of the lack of respect for others. Goa and Uttarakhand are fed up with tourist behaviour, even if they need the money from tourism. Thailand is similarly wary of large groups of Indians and this makes life difficult for Indians who try to follow local rules and customs. Much of the internal anger comes from law-abiding Indians, which is a small but vocal category. However, I am torn between all the arguments, for and against. I do not for instance agree that poor and small-town Indians behave badly as a matter of course, because they do not understand Western societal standards. I do not agree that poor and small-town Indians behave badly at all. The worst behaviour comes from the middle classes, from people with new money and from some sort of natural exuberance at being able to do all these things denied to them before. The worst vulgarity happens when the rich celebrate – massive weddings, massive fireworks displays at Diwali and so on. Notions of compromise and “adjusting”, which were common in public places, are being eroded and replaced by aggression and an insistence on the right to be unruly and loud."

Ranjona Banerji, Deccan Chronicle

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