Home Opinion Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated Just for You
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 Quint
Opinion
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Keep the chai, forget the paper. Read the best opinion and editorial articles from across the print media on Sunday View.
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A critique Survey useful, Budget lazy
In his column for The Indian Express, P Chidamabaram writes that the Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1 February did not spell out the government’s policies that will address concerns such as
slowing growth rate,
poverty and inequality,
stagnant investment,
widespread unemployment,
neglect of welfare,
depreciation of the rupee, and
the huge gaps between the demand and supply of infrastructure and essential services.
And this is despite the Chief Economic Advisor advising "caution, not pessimism" in the Economic Survey released the day before.
There were cruel expenditure cuts in the budget allocations in 2025-26 to ministries of Rural Development, Urban Development, Education, Health and many others. Under Mr Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s watch, Agriculture and Rural Development suffered a cut of Rs 60,052 crore. Jal Jeevan mission was allocated Rs 67,000 crore but in the revised estimate it was found that only Rs Rs 17,000 crore had been spent...The Finance Minister threw schemes, programmes, missions, institutes, initiatives, Funds, Committees, etc at her listeners. I counted at least 24. They will soon find out that no money was allocated for many of these announcements!
P Chidambaram for The Indian Express
Decisive break from past: Closing deal with US, India emerges more confident negotiator
In his column for The Indian Express, C Raja Mohan argues that India’s interim trade deal with the United States marks a clear inflection point in New Delhi’s engagement with Washington. But this is not without fear of American arm-twisting. He added that the new trade agreements with the US and Europe reflect India’s effort to reposition itself in a rapidly changing global economic order.
But Delhi’s negotiating culture has long been shaped by the peculiar idea that India’s opening position must also be its final one — an approach that reduces flexibility and often leaves India at the margins of global rule-making. Trade negotiations, by definition, involve give and take but the public discourse has long focused only on what India has “given away”, ignoring what it has “gained”. This zero-sum mindset is out of step with trade as a positive-sum game.
C Raja Mohan for The Indian Express
What’s in the Indo-US deal?
In his column for The New Indian Express, Prabhu Chawla writes a triumphalist narrative concealed a murkier reality of the India-US trade deal. Its bold declarations were masked by institutional ambiguity, where tariff reductions were announced but not legislated.
Nowhere does the chasm between American claims and Indian reality yawn wider than in energy security. Trump’s categorical assertion that Modi had agreed to terminate Russian oil imports and reorient supply chains toward American and Venezuelan sources was echoed by senior US officials speaking of rerouted shipping lanes. Yet, Indian officials maintained with quiet firmness that energy procurement decisions would continue to be governed by the immutable calculus of price, supply reliability and strategic diversification, and not by diplomatic pressure from any capital. Russian diplomats confirmed receiving no formal notification from New Delhi regarding cessation of crude purchases.
Prabhu Chawla for The New Indian Express
A Hindu Pakistan?
In his column for The Telegraph, Ramchandra Guha contends that India is now coming ever closer to Pakistan with regard to the merging of faith and State, except that here it is Hindus, and not Muslims, who rule over fellow citizens who are of other faiths. He asserts that there is hardly any Muslim in a position of prominence in public life. As for working-class Muslims, they are subject to discrimination in housing and employment, and to routinised taunting and humiliation, which quite often takes the form of targeted violence (as in lynchings and house demolitions).
The majoritarian cast of India today is manifest in the fact that of the over 800 members of Parliament elected on a BJP ticket in the last three general elections, not one is a Muslim. Under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the BJP has sought to create a Hindu vote bank, fighting and often winning elections on the basis of the support of Hindus alone. Once a Hindu-first politics propelled them to power, the sangh parivar has consolidated its dominance socially, through harassing and demonising Indian Muslims (and on occasion Indian Christians too).
Ramchandra Guha for The Telegraph
India’s missing engines: World’s no 4 economy lacks global giants
In his column for the The New Indian Express, Shankkar Aiyar argues that though India has vaulted from the world's 10th largest economy to the fourth largest in just over a decade, it has evaded the law of necessary and sufficient conditions. He asserts that Indian is the only economy to reach the status without the power of global brands and banks of global size to fund market expansion.
Indian companies—Tatas, Mahindra, TCS, Infosys, Bajaj, Asian Paints—do have a footprint in global markets. However, India punches way below its weight in value, volumes and market share. Indians are justifiably proud of the IT prowess and nearly $300 billion of exports. That said, none of the IT giants have a marquee brand or product. Yes, Indian IT runs global corps. Reality check: there are 34 tech companies on the Fortune 500 and none of them is Indian. Even in new-age businesses—e-commerce, for instance—the biggest players are either Amazons or cousins of transnationals.
Shankkar Aiyar for The New Indian Express
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Now We Know What All Those People Got From Epstein
In her column for The New York Times, Molly Jong-Fast writes that Jeffrey Epstein will go down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social climber. But there's another thing that the nature of Epstein files reveal: the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted. “How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close?" The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw.
The picture provided by the latest files shows how Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of superconcierge. Sometimes that meant sending the helicopter to pick up guests, as Mr. Epstein offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email, writing, “How many people will you be for the heli to island?” On another occasion, Mr. Musk asks his concierge Epstein, “Do you have any parties planned?” Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen) and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s the resistance Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files, who emails Mr. Epstein, “Shoes are very nice. Thanks.”
Molly Jong-Fast for The New York Times
The biggest threat facing Europe is not a Trump invasion. It’s his global political revolution
In his column for The Guardian, Mark Leonard argues that though European governments are terrified of Donald Trump’s threats on trade, Greenland and the future of Nato, the biggest threat is that his ideological movement could transform Europe from the inside. He states that the US National Security Strategy published by the White House in November called for strengthening the growing influence of “patriotic” European parties such as Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), Fidesz in Hungary and Vox in Spain.
Central to the movement’s self-understanding is the claim that liberalism has failed, along with the deeply interdependent globalised order it promoted after the cold war. In its telling, citizens have seen their national cultures and economies battered by an unbroken sequence of shocks that come from liberalisation: the global financial crash of 2008, the eurozone crisis two years later, the refugee crisis of 2015, the Covid pandemic in 2020, and the sharp rise in living costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Each crisis, it argues, has exposed the limits of liberal governance, overwhelmed state capacity and fuelled suspicion about whose interests governments were really serving. Governments rescued the banks, they point out, but cut welfare payments and let people’s homes be repossessed. Ordinary people paid the cumulative price of these crises – through lost jobs, strained services or rising bills – while elites were shielded from the consequences.
Mark Leonard for The Guardian
AI moment: India must choose pragmatism over hype
In their column for Deccan Herald, Prashant Kumar Choudhary and Alok Aditya write that India’s stance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from the margins of policy debate to the centre of economic decision-making. They cite the Economic Survey 2025-26, which discusses AI's presence across banking, logistics, healthcare, education, and governance. Yet, they argue, that the real challenge before India is no longer adoption alone, but its alignment with economic structure, labour realities, and developmental priorities.
India ranks among the top global contributors to AI research publications, hosts one of the world’s largest pools of technical talent, and ranks second only to the United States in AI workforce literacy. Yet paradoxically, India accounts for only about 2% of global start-ups focused on training data curation, pointing to an underdeveloped domestic data value chain. This gap matters, as access to high-quality, context-specific data is becoming a critical bottleneck in AI development.
Prashant Kumar Choudhary, Alok Aditya for Deccan Herald
Should You Break Friendships Over Politics?
In his column for The New Indian Express, Utkarsh Amitabh contends that it is usually a mistake to end a friendship over politics, illustrating his argument through Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, two of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, who ended their friendship over politics.
Today this pattern repeats constantly, accelerated by social media and sharpened by polarisation. Someone posts something; we decide what it says about them; we act on that judgment. The sequence can take minutes. We speak of “cutting people off” as though relationships were tumors. The cost is easy to underestimate. Disagreement permits reply, clarification, and revision. Silence permits nothing.
