Yamini Aiyar is a Visiting Professor of Practice at Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru made an observation about MK Gandhi, capturing a feeling that was experienced widely but never articulated as sharply. To slightly paraphrase Nehru: “The dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear; pervasive, oppressive, strangling fear; fear of… the police; fear of the official class; fear of the laws meant to suppress and of prison… And then Gandhi came… Suddenly, as it were, the black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders.”

Federalism is not just about institutional arrangements; it is about accommodating India's many identities. The erosion of that principle of accommodation helps explain many of the institutional problems we see today.

We have a unique opportunity to rebuild an education system worthy of our youth

The linking of SIR with welfare benefits is the final act in the slow remaking of the Indian from citizen to labharthi. The rights-bearing active claimant is now a distant memory

For several years, an argument has been making repeated rounds in political circles — especially in Hindu nationalist ones, though even those not particularly
sympathetic to Hindu nationalism have sometimes expressed the same view, if less often and less emphatically. The argument is that, for all practical purposes, members of the “Gandhi Dynasty” — Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka — have become unwitting promoters of Narendra Modi’s ascending political fortunes.