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

In his piece for The Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan argues that India’s quiet support for the US‑Israel war on Iran, without condemning their actions, amounts to weak and irresponsible statecraft that ignores New Delhi’s own energy and food security needs.He warns that this “grey silence” risks harming India’s interests and credibility, especially given rising oil, gas and fertiliser shortages tied to the conflict.India’s closeness to Israel is older than the Bharatiya Janata Party’s infatuation with it, but the present relationship is more than the sum of arms deals and intelligence; it is, on Modi’s part at least, a meeting of minds. For all the talk of realpolitik, what we have is an ideological connection that, like Israel’s curious hold on the American mind, seems to transcend national self-interest. The prime minister’s delight in being decorated with a bauble improvised by the Israelis for his gratification is further evidence, if any were required, that his personalisation of Indian diplomacy and his backslapping connection with global strongmen (which served India so well with Xi Jinping and Donald Trump) has begun to damage India’s standing.Mukul Kesavan, The TelegraphIn his weekly column for The Indian Express, P Chidambaram reminds readers that millions of adult Indian citizens are being left off the electoral rolls, effectively turning them into non‑voters and undermining their constitutional right to vote.Ideally, the last column in all the rows should be 100 per cent, but we do not live in a perfect world. A small number of genuine adult citizens may be left out of the electoral rolls despite an earnest effort by the government, political parties and citizens groups. However, such an effort was conspicuously absent during the SIR exercise. Contrast with the effort made in the United States under the Civil Rights Act, 1964, to enroll black Americans who had been excluded on illegal grounds. The burden was on the ECI to ensure that persons were included in the electoral rolls on the basis of adult suffrage. On the contrary, under SIR, the ECI adopted a hostile attitude and cast the burden upon the voters to prove their citizenship; those who were unable to do so were promptly excluded from the electoral rolls. P Chidambaram, The Indian ExpressOf all the fallout from the West Asia conflict and the ongoing “oil wars,” Mohamed Zeeshan writes in the Deccan Herald that one problem being overlooked is how higher oil prices could reshape the AI industry.Shared and equitable access to AI is a rapidly evolving game – and much of it will perhaps be determined by global energy markets, which are now in disarray. More than most recent tech advances, AI is an energy guzzler on an industrial scale. From 2024 to 2030, the IEA estimates that consumption could grow more than four times faster than the consumption of all other sectors combined.These challenges would especially hurt smaller countries.Mohamed Zeeshan, Deccan Herald "Energy costs may also dictate the kind of AI you get access to. Not all AI models are created equal, and more sophisticated models – which perform better and make fewer mistakes – demand more energy to function. That also makes them costlier to access, and in result, some of the best, most sophisticated AI models may automatically fly out of the reach of individuals, smaller businesses or poorer economies," he adds."And then there are those geniuses who jump straight into the “in my day we had no piped or cylinder gas” stories," writes Ranjona Banerji in the Deccan Chronicle.Banerji writes that while rising LPG prices have triggered predictable complaints, the debate is often clouded by nostalgia, hypocrisy and misogynistic moral overtones.I received one of those asinine social media forwards the other day about the current cooking gas shortage in India. It postulated that people were “whining like whores” over the shortage and what could the poor government do anyway. Apart from the content of the forward, the only purpose of which was to save the government from criticism, the phrase “whining like whores” really got my goat...Fake or exploitative nostalgia stories to prop up an incompetent government is one thing. Double standards are the other. In your “day” there was no internet either. But you’re now using it to spread your nonsense. So why wouldn’t a whore want the convenience of cooking gas?Ranjona Banerji, Deccan ChronicleIn the Hindustan Times, Karan Thapar writes that Nepal’s recent election, with Balendra Shah’s RSP emerging victorious, feels reminiscent of India’s 1977 Janata Party wave, marking a sharp rejection of the old political order and reflecting people’s hopes for a fresh start.But he also warns that the new leadership has big expectations riding on it, and if it fails to deliver, it could backfire, just as it did in India after 1977. "The biggest challenge facing the new government is the economy," he writes.The election results have shut the door on the past and opened a passage to a new future. It’s not just a fresh beginning. It feels like a new life. Balendra Shah, popularly known as Balen, and his Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP) swept to an unbelievable landslide majority. They have won 182 seats out of 275, just two short of a two-thirds majority. This means Balendra Shah, who’s only 35, will be Nepal’s new prime minister (PM)...In contrast to the RSP, the old Nepali political order has been decimated. Former PMs like KP Sharma Oli and Madhav Nepal have been defeated. Although Prachanda won, his daughter lost. This is a clear sign that Nepal has bid goodbye to the old guard. In its place, a new generation will rule. More technocratic and pragmatic, and a lot less ideological.Karan Thapar, Hindustan TimesWriting for the Deccan Herald, Venkatesh Nayak argues that excluding anti‑corruption agencies like the State Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (SV&ACB) from the RTI Act undermines transparency and weakens citizens’ ability to hold powerful institutions accountable.He writes, "When there are multiple exemption clauses in the RTI Act to prevent unwarranted transparency from derailing the processes of crime investigation and prosecution, there is no justifiable reason why anti-corruption agencies must be marched out of its coverage." According to official data, the average number of cases the SV&ACB probed annually, since 2020, has never crossed a hundred. Between April 2008 and March 2021, it received over 3,500 RTI applications, of which barely 6 percent were rejected. Less than five cases reached the State Information Commission (SIC). The government has not offered any justification for insulating the SV&ACB from the RTI Act, despite this limited workload...According to the Central Information Commission’s (CIC) annual reports, the CBI has dealt with more than 25,000 RTI applications between April 2016 and March 2025. From a high of 49 percent, the proportion of rejection of RTIs has come down to 34 percent now. Given CBI’s resistance to transparency, this data is intriguing. What kind of information the CBI is disclosing to whom has never been researched.Venkatesh Nayak, Deccan HeraldWriting for the Hindustan Times, Ajai Malhotra argues that the Hormuz crisis exposes the limits of US military dominance, showing that overwhelming power no longer guarantees political control in an increasingly multipolar world.He says India must avoid overdependence on any one partner and instead pursue strategic autonomy and multi-alignment to protect its energy security and national interests.Nearly 10 million Indian citizens live and work across the Gulf, remitting over $50 billion annually and sustaining millions of families at home. India also supplies 12 percent of the global seafaring workforce. As tensions continue to escalate, the safety of our citizens and protection of their livelihoods demand that India engage all parties with greater diplomatic assertiveness, commensurate with our huge stakes. Almost half of India’s crude imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, while our gas dependence on it is even more concentrated. Ensuring the safe passage of Indian vessels through the Gulf will require our active diplomatic efforts with all combatants, including Iran. India secured the safe passage of two LPG tankers through the Strait by reaching out to Iran — evidence that our bilateral channels retain value even amid conflict.Ajai Malhotra, Hindustan TimesCommenting on Rahul Gandhi’s address at a “Samvidhan Sammelan” (Constitution conference) in Lucknow last week, senior journalist Shyamlal Yadav writes in The Indian Express that while the opposition leader invoked icons like Kanshi Ram, his words stand in contrast to his party’s history of caste exclusion in UP."During the premiership of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv, Congress appointed 10 UP CMs, all of whom belonged to upper castes, with the selection ignoring social justice or equitable representation," he writes.While addressing a “Samvidhan Sammelan” (Constitution conference) in Lucknow last week, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, said had India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru been alive he would have made Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. In the course of Nehru’s nearly 17-year-long tenure as the PM over multiple terms, during which he also called the shots in the Congress’s affairs, UP saw four CMs from the party, all of whom belonged to upper castes. The Congress continued to be a dominant force in UP up to 1989.Shyamlal Yadav, The Indian ExpressWriting for The New Indian Express, Santwana Bhattacharya argues that the best way to tackle global crises is by reviving open, rational discussion and strengthening informed, democratic discourse. She makes her case by delving into the complexities of Jürgen Habermas’ philosophical ideas.Philosophers are not doing too well these days. Chomsky was defrocked and walked off the pulpit just before the war. Bombs fell on a Gandhi hospital in Tehran. The other day, the Iranian strongman Ali Larijani met his end—we read of his impressive bouts of Persian wrestling with Immanuel Kant to justify ‘eastern’ theocracy, like the poet Iqbal a century ago. In between, another sentence was left hanging when Jürgen Habermas departed from the scene. Many say Habermas had already died months earlier, by philosophical suicide, when he refused to put Gaza on an equal footing with holocausts closer home, as a crisis of morality that put the world in peril. The limits of western philosophy seem as geographical as they are philosophical! The universal rights to life and dignity are not that universal after all, and seem to stop somewhere north of the Mediterranean. It remains for us to rummage through the debris of ethical models and see what can be retrieved. Even in their failing, or especially in those moments, we can peep under the hood of their thoughts, see all the inner wiring, and try to reverse-engineer a simpler but more serviceable model of use to humanity.Santwana Bhattacharya, The New Indian ExpressInside China’s Border Playbook: Beyond Skirmishes, the Silent Weapon of WaterBush-Cheney to Trumpistan, America is Going from Far Right to Further RightRhetoric Without Roadmap: Modi's Bengal Visit Shows BJP is Keen on RecalibrationKumbh Star Monalisa’s Flight to Kerala Shows Where Interfaith Couples Find SpaceAfter 12 Days of Silence, Modi Finally Called Iran. What Took So Long?'Sarke Chunar' Row: Nora Fatehi's Ultimate Saviour is 'Radical' Feminism

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

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