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It does seem like no one in this country knows anything except those in absolute but temporary power. The bureaucracy has been the torch bearer of this mindset since colonial days. They were the very first to understand that the average brown skinned native was...

The US Supreme Court’s overturning of the landmark court ruling Roe vs Wade nearly half a century ago giving the country’s women constitutional protection for abortion indicates dark times. It undermines women’s rights over their own bodies and personal family choices. The US SC verdict...

One of our Supreme Court judges made an important if startling point when giving a lecture abroad. A legal website reporting his speech gave this headline to the story: “Will result in slippery slope if courts are regarded as only organ to defend citizens’ rights”....

The Uttarakhand government has been struggling to work with only 76 IAS officers in the state, even though it has an allocated cadre strength of 120 IAS officers. Of these, seven are on Central deputation. They include Ashish Joshi, Sridhar Babu Addanki, Jyoti Yadav, Raghav...

Austria and New Zealand may be far apart geographically, but we are connected by shared values and principles. Particularly relevant today is our longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons and our shared concern about the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament. While the threat of nuclear...

French politics is thrown into turmoil after President Emmanuel Macron lost control of the National Assembly in legislative elections in which a newly formed Left-wing alliance made significant gains and the Far-right registered a record victory. The result, announced in the early hours of June 20,...

India has cried foul over China’s decision to put on hold UN listing of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s (LeT) second-in-command Abdul Rehman Makki. India and the US, June 1, jointly proposed to list Makki, the brother-in-law of Lashkar-e-Taiba head and 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed, under the UN Security...

The UK government has done a disservice to the cause of free speech and democracy by approving the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. UK home secretary Priti Patel dealt a blow to the decade-long efforts Assange has been making...

On the Agniveer issue, the government has again acted first and contemplated the consequences later. What was meant to be an experiment and affecting only a small portion of the recruitment suddenly replaced the existing process entirely. The tweaking of the scheme on the fly,...

The “heaven-born” often catch a lot of flak, usually when they are seen as misusing their privileges or as pliant tools of their political masters. But many IAS officers get appreciated for silently going about their work, often below the radar. Certainly, it’s not often...