It’s the death of the republic, lamented one of the few liberals on my school alumni WhatsApp group. As the imagery of Prime Minister Narendra Modi presiding, like a Hindu suratrana, over the bhumi-pujan of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya beamed...
Election with Times, which was simulcast across TOI and Times Now and Mirror Now across several elections (Gujarat 2017, Karnataka 2018, Madhya Pradesh 2018, Chhattisgarh 2018, Rajasthan 2018, Lok Sabha 2019)
Machismo has always had political currency in UP, the original birthplace of terms like ‘dabang’, ‘bahubali’ and the utterly untranslatable ‘varchasv ki larhai’. It lies at the heart of Akhilesh Yadav’s 2017 makeover, as epitomised by his “let’s...
The big elephant statues stand forlorn in the afternoon heat. It’s the height of the election campaign but there isn’t a soul out to see them or the huge four-sided Brahma-like statue of Mayawati that stands as the centerpiece of BSP’s imposing...
29 assembly constituencies have returned the same party to power through the 2002, 2007 and 2012. What is special about them is that they make up core party bastions that are yet to be breached and any change here in 2017 would reflect a wider...
BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Vinay Katiyar is founder president of Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s youth wing, Bajrang Dal, and has been a long-time advocate of building a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He spoke to Nalin Mehta and Sanjeev Singh about BJP’s electoral...
Kalraj Mishra is Union cabinet minister for micro, small and medium enterprises and BJP MP from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh. With UP’s voters set to cast their votes in the state’s fourth phase of voting on February 23, he spoke to Nalin Mehta and...
With political parties trading charges on the suicide of ex-soldier Ram Kishan Grewal on OROP, emotions are running high on both sides. Major Navdeep Singh, advocate in Punjab and Haryana high court, who was a member of the defence minister’s...
These are strange times for India’s armed forces. Our soldiers are caught in the middle of the biggest chestthumping and political messaging exercise since the Kargil war, which includes the PM’s laudable ‘Sandesh for Soldiers’ initiative with...
Lord Harris, governor general of colonial Bombay in the 1890s and co-founder of what was then the Imperial Cricket Council, captured for posterity the special beauty of cricket when he declared that to play “cricket is more remote than anything...
The Washington-based Pew Research Center recently released a new India survey that shows that over two years into his tenure as prime minister, most Indians remain upbeat about Narendra Modi even as they see India playing a larger role in the...
He was photographed eating jalebis and samosas at a dusty roadside shop in Mau; ate roti-chokha for lunch with yet another Dalit couple, Rukmini Devi and Swaminath Ram, in the same district; and spouted a new poll slogan, “janta trast hai, Modiji...