TheJaggi

The Narendra Modi government, after 12 years in power, needs a significant (and non-cosmetic) makeover. While it has recovered after the 2024 setback by registering huge wins in West Bengal and Assam, following on the heels of Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi and Bihar earlier, these political successes are not an end in themselves. Despite a good macroeconomic record so far, there is no guarantee that the government will be able to guide the economy through the current global and technological disruptions unless it has competent people manning the operations. It should work on the assumption that it may take only one major failure for the entire political narrative around its successes to start unravelling. The NEET paper leaks and the ongoing loss of public confidence in the CBSE exam results (which have been badly managed when new technology needs a prolonged period of testing) show that someone is either sleeping on his watch or not very competent. The needle of accountability points ...

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that she is willing to listen to investors on what they have to say about reducing taxes on long-term and short-term capital gains (LTCG and STCG). No harm in listening to anyone, but she would do well to listen to others as well, and not just equity investors who are any way mollycoddled in all tax jurisdictions. There are two things we need to understand. Capital infusion is vital for productivity and growth, so there is a case to be made for giving equity investment some preferential treatment on taxes. The question is how much preferential treatment. Long-term capital gains on equity are taxed at 12.5 percent and short-term at 15 percent provided the transactions are done through stock exchanges on which securities transaction taxes are paid. Now compare this to how debt is taxed. Debt is also capital, and it is taxed in the investor’s hands at his or her tax bracket. At the top end that means a gross tax of over 30 percent, when ...

In all the euphoria over the BJP’s massive win in West Bengal, the Modi government should not forget that good ties with Bangladesh are important. It’s not that New Delhi has been asleep at the wheel. Well before the West Bengal results were out, it had chosen Dinesh Trivedi – a politician – as its new envoy to Dhaka, signalling that ties with that country will be parsed through the political prism as well. After the disastrous tenure of Mohammad Yunus, who was at the helm as chief advisor to the interim government, the elections last February brought in a new majority government headed by Tarique Rahman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. From all indications, Rahman wants to improve ties with India, a country that surrounds it on three sides. Any improvement in Bangladesh’s economic situation depends on cooperation with India. Anti-India elements believe they can also tap American and Chinese investments for growth, but geography says something else. It is in India’s interests t...

There is an Indian story revolving around a king who asked his advisors to invent something where his feet would never get dirty when walking around. His advisors got into a frenzy, for a regal wish is like an order with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. One of the solutions was to cover the whole kingdom with leather so that no dirt would stick to His Majesty’s feet. But it was clearly expensive and impractical, for this would mean nothing would grow on the land beneath if it was covered fully with leather, or any other thing, for that matter. The ultimate logical solution was found in the invention of footwear. You wear it and your feet stay clean if you so desire. Today, when large language models (LLMs) are driving the pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI), or artificial general intelligence (AGI) to rival human intelligence, it appears that the solutions we are seeking are similar to covering the earth with leather in order to keep your feet clean. The query the mo...

The world’s idea of what constitutes a “world war” has been shaped by two massive wars in the first half of the 20th century. In these two “world wars”, multiple countries were at war with multiple other countries simultaneously. These direct combatants often used resources from non-belligerents (as Great Britain did using Indian soldiers and resources in the two world wars) and both wars ended only when one coalition achieved a comprehensive victory. Today, where there are two unresolved conflicts going on in Europe (Ukraine-Russia) and West Asia (Iran-US-Israel plus some Gulf countries), we are still not able to call this a “world war” because of the framing that happened in our minds over the 20th century’s two world wars. Or, maybe, we are hesitating to call a spade a spade because of what it implies for our world’s future survival. Technology and the nature of warfare have changed, not only because of drones and missiles, but also because of the role played by satellite-based surv...

At a time when the country faces huge economic disruptions due to the Gulf war and also artificial intelligence-related technology, the Modi government should evaluate and reorient the scheme where companies have to contribute two percent of their net profits for corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects. The issue is one of relative utility of CSR spends: are they better spent being invested in long-term social projects whose utility may be in some doubt, or on their own employees whose livelihoods may be threatened by economic disruptions, or even protecting themselves from other business threats? With new AI tools like Anthropic’s Mythos (which can discover cyber vulnerabilities of legacy systems very quickly) now coming into the market (and bad actors may soon have access to similar tools), the possibility of losses stemming from malware and cyber attacks is no longer a distant threat. It is not just competition business need to worry about, but malicious attacks too. In Augus...

It is interesting that Chinese supremo Xi Jinping should invoke the “Thucydides Trap” during Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, indirectly suggesting that the US should not fret too much about China’s rise and instead seek to partner with it. The Thucydides Trap, which is attributed to fifth century BCE Greek historian Thucydides, who sought to understand the underlying causes behind the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, posits that when a new power rises, the existing power feels threatened and war is often the result. Thucydides believed that the primary cause of the war was Sparta's fears over Athens' rise,  The joke, assuming Xi can take one, is on him. It is not just the USA, but China as well that is likely to fall into the Thucydides trap - assuming it has not already fallen into one - when it sees India’s rise. While India’s rise is nowhere near the level at which China needs to feel threatened, it is already beginning to take note, and making sure that India’s...

The rise of the Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), a political party set up by actor Joseph Vijay in Tamil Nadu, implies the slow uprooting of Dravidianism in the state. With a 35 percent vote share, TVK is still lower than the combined share of the DMK and AIADMK, with 45 percent, but a far cry from the above 70+ percent combined share that the latter held in 2021. The Dravidian identity, artificially created during colonial rule, is about racially dividing Indians between the Aryan north and the Dravidian south. It also has a caste component of virulent anti-Brahminism. Tamil politicians raise the idea of the Dravidian identity to ridiculous levels of differentiation, where the Hindi north is pitted against the south, where even the supposed Hindu religious connections between north and south, as evidenced by the existence of thousands of temples in southern India, is deemed to be different from the the north. It is less so outside Tamil Nadu, but the undercurrent is there. There are c...

If India is to meet its main economic, social and geopolitical challenges, Muslim politics has to change. The post-1947 approach of the “secular” parties - which has been about making symbolic concessions to appease Muslims and then dividing the Hindu vote using various means - is now past its sell-by date. Both Muslims and Hindus have seen past this strategy. Muslims are no longer buying the “secular” argument, though not in sufficient numbers yet to make a difference. They still vote en bloc to keep the “communal” BJP out. Hindus are also beginning to see the negative impact of divisive caste and Muslim appeasement politics, and sometimes choosing to vote in a tactical way - as they did in West Bengal and Assam in the recent assembly elections.  In West Bengal, the widely expected Muslim polarisation in favour of Mamata Banerjee did not happen on a scale where she could have won. According to an analysis by The Times of India (5 May 2026), in the 142 seats where Muslim numbers w...

India regularly gets listed as a country a country of “particular concern” by the US Council for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). This institution is highly irrelevant and also has no business commenting on other countries’ religious freedoms, especially when it can’t do so in its own home country, the USA. We must ignore all USCIRF reports as motivated, but we must discuss the core definition of what religious freedom should really mean, and what it has become. The current idea of religious freedom comes from the European experience with religious persecution – where Catholics and Protestants fought bloody battles in the past – and, more recently, from the American Protestant idea of religious freedom, which is largely about the right to proselytise. America, which was initially colonised by Protestant groups fleeing the increasing secularisation of Europe, is a particular believer in the innate evil of pagan groups, and that their liberation from their beliefs is part of...