Author: Deshwale National Desk

How a classified MHA manual keeps the President, Prime Minister, and their families safe, and what the West Bengal episode reveals when it fails On Saturday, March 7, President Droupadi Murmu landed at Bagdogra Airport in north Bengal for the 9th International Santal Conference, one of the most significant annual gatherings of India’s Santal tribal community. She is India’s first tribal President. The occasion should have been a moment of profound dignity. It was not. What unfolded over the next several hours, a missing Chief Minister, a substituted venue, thousands of Santal community members locked outside, and a sitting President…

There is a sound that defines every Indian city. It is not the metro bell or the bus horn. It is the putt-putt of an autorickshaw negotiating a gap in traffic that no car would dare attempt. In Maharashtra, that sound now carries a new weight. The state government has announced a temporary freeze on new autorickshaw permits, citing traffic congestion and worsening air pollution across its major urban centres. Transport Minister Pratap Sarnaik confirmed the decision, noting that nearly 1.4 million autorickshaw permits have already been issued across the state. The halt, taken with central government approval, applies statewide…

I still remember the Delhi of the late nineties, a sprawling, radial beast of a city where every journey inevitably dragged you through the suffocating chokeholds of ITO or the crumbling arteries of the Ring Road. If you lived in the dusty northern peripheries and had business in the east, you did not plan a commute. You planned an expedition. The capital was a city of spokes, dragging everyone to the centre, leaving the fringes to fend for themselves in a perpetual gridlock. On Sunday, the 8th of March 2026, the fundamental geography of this historic capital shifted. When the…

एक असुविधाजनक सवाल एक सवाल है जो बहुत से भारतीयों के मन में चुपचाप बैठा रहता है। डाइनिंग टेबल पर यह सवाल असहजता लाता है। टीवी एंकर इससे बचते हैं। लेकिन यह पूछा जाना ज़रूरी है, बिना किसी नाटक के: क्या वे लोग जो भारत चलाते हैं, भारत की आवाज़ बनते हैं और भारत से सबसे ज़्यादा फ़ायदा उठाते हैं, उनकी पहली वफ़ादारी वाकई भारत के प्रति है? इस सवाल का एक असुविधाजनक जवाब भारत के सत्ताधारी वर्ग के बच्चों की ज़िंदगियों में मिलता है। अगली पीढ़ी का पश्चिम की तरफ़ रुख़ यह महज़ इत्तेफ़ाक़ नहीं है। भारत के राजनीतिक,…

There is a question that sits quietly at the back of many Indian minds but rarely gets asked out loud in polite company. It is the kind of question that makes dinner tables uncomfortable and television anchors nervous. And yet it demands to be asked, cleanly and without theatre: do the people who run India, speak for India, and profit most from India actually have India as their first allegiance? The children of the powerful offer one uncomfortable answer. The Offshore Lives of India’s Ruling Class The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. Across India’s political, bureaucratic, business and…

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over you after years of covering Indian cities. You have walked the same footpaths in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi. You have filed the same stories about the same open drains, the same pan stains on heritage walls, the same plastic bags floating past the same municipal signboards that say “Keep Your City Clean.” You have interviewed the same civic officials who speak with great conviction about transformation, and you have returned the next morning to find the same cigarette butts at the same corner. After 25 years of this, you…

Asia’s oldest suburban railway was born in 1853. It still runs. But at what cost and compared to whom? On Mumbai’s platforms, where the air thickens with sweat and desperation, the suburban railway stands as both saviour and scourge. This 390-kilometre network, threading the Western, Central, and Harbour lines, propels 7.5 million commuters daily, a figure that eclipses most global peers in raw volume. Yet beneath the heroism of its endurance lies a grim ledger. What began as an imperial conduit for cotton and clerks has become a humanitarian crisis. Promises of reform have been drowned repeatedly in monsoon floods…

Prologue: echoes from the Marina Political Analysis | Tamil Nadu | Strategic Affairs From the salt-kissed shores of Marina Beach, where Periyar’s statues gaze eternally upon the Bay of Bengal and the ghosts of Anna Durai’s rationalism stir in every fisherman’s net, the gathering storm of Tamil Nadu’s 2026 assembly elections takes vivid shape. This is a land where cinema scripts revolutions and caste whispers louder than manifestos. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam alliance, a colossus with 133 seats from 2021 and Congress as its steadfast flank, eyes a second term buoyed by welfare largesse and anti-Hindi fervour.…

Maharashtra’s economy is expected to grow at 7.9 percent in the financial year 2025-26, according to the state Economic Survey presented before the Assembly. The estimate places the state ahead of the projected national growth rate of about 7.4 percent, and marks a meaningful acceleration from the 7.3 percent growth recorded in 2024-25. The survey offers a broadly optimistic picture. Services continue to drive the state’s economic engine. Industry is holding its ground. Agriculture, however, faces a sharp slowdown after an unusually strong year, raising familiar questions about how evenly this growth is shared. The numbers, taken together, reflect the…

Editor’s Note: Quotes from protesters, marchers, locals, and public figures in this analysis are representative, drawn from witness accounts, on-ground reporting, and multiple public sources covering the events. The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 1, 2026, in a joint US-Israel airstrike has sent shockwaves far beyond the Middle East. In India’s Kashmir Valley, it triggered the largest street demonstrations since the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. Thousands, mostly from the Shia community, took to the streets of Srinagar and northern towns like Sumbal and Pattan, waving Iranian flags and chanting against what they see…