Democracy. 1 essay and 5 notes.

I’m reading Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi, and one section stopped me in my tracks: his account of how India conducted its first general election. The scale of it is staggering. Guha walks through the numbers, the infrastructure, the people and the resources it took, and he credits much of it to one…

As always, a brilliant and incisive analysis of the student protests by Pranay Kotasthane: The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going…

Rahul Verma on the student protests: Governments find such protests much harder to confront because there is no obvious ideological counter-narrative. One can’t simply invoke nationalism or accuse every dissatisfied student of serving foreign interests when the grievance concerns administrative failure. The usual…

The Wire on the student protests:

What makes this moment fundamentally different is that the public is no longer appearing terrified. Despite heavy police deployment, massive surveillance cameras and the use of tear gas and force, the sheer volume of everyday citizens, broke the atmosphere of intimidation. People didn’t just step out of their homes. They stepped out and converted individual isolation into a loud, collective voice.
By refusing to be divided, labelled or silenced, this student-led movement has stripped the Modi regime of its standard playbook, leaving the political leadership, which banks on Modi’s ‘strongman’ image is looking visibly unsettled and facing an unavoidable crisis of accountability.

From this article in the Foreign Affairs: Bukele has forced Salvadorans to trade civil liberties for a sense of security, a bargain that has only grown starker over his five years as president. But whether this arrangement lasts depends on whether it can evolve into a sustainable model of governance, which, given…