Behind the language of protection, India’s new transgender law advances a Hindu nationalist project that recasts gender variance through state classification while deepening exclusions along caste and religious lines
As Baloch nationalism changed from tribal sardar-led, negotiation-driven politics to a human rights movement, it opened spaces for women like the BYC’s Mahrang Baloch
A top monk’s alleged rape of a child threatens to unmask the Sri Lankan sangha, but its moral decay is rooted in the millennia-long transformation of the Buddha’s dhamma into Sinhala Buddhism
Vijay’s rise as Tamil Nadu’s new chief minister has bamboozled analysts, and his political vision is hypothesized based on “punch dialogues” rather than ideological clarity
Field Marshal Asim Munir is riding high on Pakistan’s mediation of US–Iran talks, but the country remains beset by economic crisis, a rapacious elite, IMF-imposed austerity and violent insurgencies
New Delhi’s redistricting of Ladakh has raised fears of Muslim marginalisation and heightened tensions with the Buddhist community, threatening a Leh–Kargil alliance demanding statehood and rights
Pakistan’s growing proximity to Saudi Arabia has pushed the UAE closer to India, which could have implications for theatres of conflict such as Balochistan and Kashmir
The journalist and writer Zeyad Masroor Khan talks to Harsh Mander about his childhood in Aligarh and the deepening communal divisions in present-day India
‘India: 5,000 Years of History in the Subcontinent’ revisits millennia of Southasia’s past beyond dynasties and nationalist mythmaking, while raising larger questions about the intellectual traditions that shape historiography.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s unprecedented electoral victory in West Bengal exposes the deep Bengali roots of Hindu nationalism and shatters the myth of secular bhadralok liberalism
