In Focus by The Hindu

Turkey’s high-stakes presidential elections are headed for a run-off. None of the candidates could cross the 50% mark needed to win the presidency in the first round, which took place on May 14. Now the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) will face each other once again on May 28. In the elections held last Sunday, Erd...

The Congress has returned to power in Karnataka with an emphatic victory. It has won 135 seats – more than double the BJP’s tally – and has increased its vote share by 5% from the last Assembly poll. While the BJP held on to its vote share, its seat share fell by one-third. All the high decibel campaigning by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah proved to be inadequate. How did...

We are living through an era of immense political and social turmoil. People have thought the same in many past eras too. But still, the enormity of the present is something that we cannot overlook. Assumptions about our collective self that evolved over decades have been challenged, and we seem to be in the search for alternative organizing principles. This is true for India, as is for the whole...

The recent announcement from the World Health Organization that COVID-19 would no longer be considered a public health emergency of international concern sort of threw a spanner in the works.  Was this a message of hope? Is it true that COVID is really over? What about vaccination or masking? The questions were aplenty. Today we have with us Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, former chief scientist of the WH...

Delhi has been witnessing a series of demolition drives of working class neighbourhoods. These demolitions are being carried out as part of a ‘beautification’ drive ahead of the G-20 Summit in Delhi in September this year. Places where citizens’ homes were reduced to rubble included neighbourhoods in Mehrauli and Ghosiya Colony, Tughlaqabad, Kashmere Gate, and Moolchand Basti at Rajghat. Residents...

About 60 have been killed, more than 230 injured, and thousands have been displaced following inter-ethnic clashes in Manipur. According to the state government, around 1,700 houses, including religious places, were burnt. The clashes followed months of mounting tensions over successive measures by the Manipur government that the state’s tribal groups believe to be against their interests. The imm...

The divorce rate in India is about 1.1 per cent, one of the lowest in the world. Census 2011 figures however, show that the population that is ‘separated’ for various reasons, is almost triple the divorced number. On May 1, the Supreme Court held that it could grant divorce by mutual consent and spare couples the “misery” of having to wait usual period of six to 18 months. This was done under Arti...

India, it would appear, is in perpetual election mode. Every State Assembly election, analysts believe, will tell us about the mood of the people as the country moves towards the big one – the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.  Will Narendra Modi be able to grab a third term as Prime Minister? Does the Opposition have enough to see it across the finish line in 2024? Is the conviction and disqualificati...

The Indian Premier League (IPL) has been in action since 2008, the year after India won the inaugural T20 World Cup. When Mumbai Indians played Rajasthan Royals in Mumbai on April 30, it marked the 1,000th match of the competition since its inception. This is a historic moment in the history of the league, attesting to its extraordinary success and staying power. On this landmark occasion, we take...

Chess has a new world champion – 30-year-old Ding Liren from China. He defeated Russia’a world no. 2 Ian Nepomniatchi to become only the 17th player in chess history to wear this crown. He is the first ever Chinese and the first Asian since Viswanathan Anand to be achieve this. This year’s world title championship match took place under the looming absence of defending champion Magnus Carlsen, who...

Between September 2022 and February 2023, eight cheetahs from Namibia and 12 from South Africa were translocated to India as part of an initiative to reintroduce the species in India, where it had gone extinct in the 1950s. The animals were released in the 748 sq km Kuno National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh, and seemed to be doing well until, within a span of a month, two out of the 20 cheetahs d...

Social media was abuzz recently with a controversy over Bournvita, a product that most of us have probably had as children. This sparked a discussion around all of the processed and packaged foods that are now widely available and consumed in the country.  How healthy are these foods? With a lot of these items, it is not always easy to understand their nutritional content, going by the ingredients...

Sudan is once again on the verge of a civil war. Fighting erupted on April 15 between two military factions, leading to the death of more than 400 civilians, and leaving around 3,700 injured so far. One of the factions is headed by Lt. Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the commander of the country’s military, and the other is led by Lt. Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who controls a state-sponsored paramilit...

On the 22nd of April, Pakistan announced that its Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will visit India for a multilateral meeting with his Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or SCO, counterparts. The visit by a Pakistani Foreign Minister to India comes after a long gap.  Also, on the 22nd of April, five Indian soldiers were killed close to the Line of Control, pointing out yet again the danger...

The Tiger Census 2022, released recently, estimates that India has 3,167 tigers at present. This is a slight increase from the figure in 2018’s report, which was 2,967. Project Tiger first began in 1973 when there was an alarming decline of the national animal. From the nine reserves the country had in 1973, there are now 53 reserves, spanning over 75,000 sq km, roughly 2.3% of India’s land area....

There finally seems to be some movement towards a peace settlement in the Yemen civil war, which has been raging for nine years now. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have been fighting the Saudi coalition forces, are now in talks with Saudi Arabia with Omani mediation. Although the negotiations are expected to take time before they yield results, there is some optimism in the air as the talks ar...

The Education Ministry has released the pre-draft of the National Curriculum Framework for school education, or NCF-2023, for public feedback and comments. The document, which was last revised in 2005, has a critical role to play in determining pedagogical approaches and how textbooks are designed. Some key recommendations of NCF-2023 that have made headlines include: board exams twice a year, a s...

The mafia-style execution of former legislator Atiq Ahmed and his brother, Khalid Azim, by three assailants on the night of April 15 in Prayagraj, while speaking to reporters on camera has again turned the spotlight on the absence of the rule of law in Uttar Pradesh. Two days earlier, on the 13th of April, Atiq’s son, Asad Ahmed, was killed in an alleged encounter with the police in Jhansi. The ki...

It's back in the news and it's back everywhere. Covid-19, which seemed to be going away, has had a resurgence in India recently, with the data as of April 14, showing that over 11,000 new cases have been recorded. While this particular sub-variant, XBB.1.16, is believed to be mild and not as virulent as last 2021's Delta variant, the government is taking the surge in cases seriously, and has asked...

In May 2022, Finland, along with its Nordic neighbor Sweden, applied for NATO membership. It took less than a year for it to formally become NATO’s 31st member. With this, NATO’s border with Russia has more than doubled – from 1,200 km to 2,500 km. How does this development change the security architecture of Europe? Will it lead to a militarization of the Russia-Finland border? How big a strategi...

There have been some dire predictions about how hazardous the heat is going to be this summer. India this year experienced its warmest February since 1877, and in November last year, the World Bank warned that India could become one of the first places in the world where wet-bulb temperatures could increase beyond the survivability threshold of 35°C. Furthermore, last month, Peter Dynes, chief str...

By quashing the Information & Broadcasting Ministry’s order ceasing operations of the Malayalam news channel, Media One, the Supreme Court appears to have sent a clear message to the government of the day – that the freedom of the press is a key pillar of Indian democracy. At a time when the press is under pressure to toe the Government’s line, the judgment is also a signal to members of the media...

A survey of nearly 10,000 people carried out for the Status of Policing in India Report 2023 suggests a high level of support for certain forms of government surveillance but reveals a lack of public awareness regarding critical issues such as the Pegasus spying scandal. The report, prepared by the NGO Common Cause and Lokniti, CSDS, finds that three out of four people believe CCTVs can help monit...

Last month, Rajasthan became the first state to enact a Right to Health Act. The legislation sparked massive protests from the medical community, with the protests finally being called off on April 4, after an agreement was reached, on the applicability of the law. The Act gives every resident of Rajasthan the right to emergency treatment care without prepayment of fees at designated health centre...

All four persons, who had been given the death sentence by a trial court for the May 2008 Jaipur bomb blasts that killed 71 persons, were acquitted by the Rajasthan High Court on the 30th of March. Those acquitted of all charges were: Mohammed Saif, Mohammed Salman, Saifur and Mohammed Sarver Azmi. The State of Rajasthan plans to file an appeal against the acquittal in the Supreme Court.  The two-...