RajivSpeak

A massive gathering in the national capital last month has thrust a long-simmering political demand into the mainstream — the removal of Scheduled Tribe (ST) status from tribal individuals who convert to Christianity or Islam. The development has set off alarm bells across Northeast India , where tribal identity, religion, land, and political autonomy are inseparably intertwined.

The heavy military presence and frequent communication blackouts in Jammu and Kashmir are taking a disproportionate toll on female education, reversing years of progress and driving up school dropout rates for girls, according to a recent analysis published in The Conversation . ​Writing for the publication, Shambhavi Siddhi , a PhD candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University , highlights that while the Indian government cited " women's empowerment " and the eradication of gender discrimination as key motivations for revoking Jammu and Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in August 2019, the reality on the ground has told a vastly different story for young women seeking an education. ​Rising Dropout Rates and Low Literacy ​According to data presented before the Indian parliament in March 2026, the secondary-level dropout rate for girls in the region peaked at 12.6% during the 2023–24 academic year—surpassing India’s national average of 9....

The BJP’s massive electoral win in West Bengal is being interpreted across political persuasions — except, of course, by the BJP itself — as the result of the alleged deletion of around 90 lakh voters from the electoral rolls during the controversial intensive revision process. This may well be true, given my own experience in Gujarat regarding the shoddy manner in which electoral revisions have often been conducted. In West Bengal, there also appeared to be a political angle to the exercise. But I am not interested in discussing that here, as enough has already appeared in the media on the subject.

This blog is in continuation of one of my previous blogs , in which I quoted a retired Gujarat cadre IAS bureaucrat telling me that I ought to stop using the word “Dalit” because it is “derogatory.” He advised me instead to use the “constitutional term, Scheduled Caste (SC).” This was in reference to my earlier story , titled India's Muslims' and Dalits' segregation levels are almost similar to the US Black-White segregation, based on a Chicago study.

Recently, I wrote a story titled "India's Muslim, Dalit segregation nears US Black-White levels: Chicago study", based on a working paper authored by Sam Asher, Kiritarth Jha, Paul Novosad, Anjali Adukia, and Brandon Tan. The paper documents how Scheduled Caste (SC) and Muslim communities in India are concentrated in neighborhoods with fewer schools, clinics, and basic infrastructure.

  The U.S. Justice Department is planning to drop criminal fraud charges against  Gautam Adani , India's richest man, following an unusual private meeting in Washington in which his lawyers offered to invest $10 billion in the American economy if prosecutors closed the case, the  New York Times reported  on May 14.

By Rajiv Shah   The Ahmedabad unit of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has released a detailed field research report titled "Are we not Indians? The Development Politics of Uprooting Citizens and Shattering Lives at  Chandola Lake ," documenting the mass demolitions in the city's periphery that took place between April 27 and May 2, 2025.

A landmark study , “The mortality burden from COVID in low-income settings: evidence from verbal autopsies in India”, using verbal autopsies of 20,000 deaths reveals that only one-third of India’s pandemic excess mortality was directly caused by SARS-CoV-2. The rest — a hidden toll running into millions — was the collateral damage of a healthcare system brought to its knees. 

Dr. Narasimha Reddy Donthi, a noted public policy expert and public interest campaigner, in a  detailed critical analysis  of two Bills introduced in Parliament in April 2026—the  Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026  and the  Delimitation Bill, 2026 , has warned that the twin bills "raise significant constitutional, political and methodological concerns — most critically, a structural inconsistency in the census basis used for Parliament versus State Assemblies, and an over-reliance on population as the sole parameter for delimitation." 

  M. K. Bhadrakumar , a career diplomat with three decades of service in postings across the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, and Turkey, has warned that the current truce in the  US–Iran war  is “fragile and ridden with contradictions.” Writing in his blog  India Punchline , Bhadrakumar argues that while Pakistan has emerged as a surprising broker of dialogue, the durability of the ceasefire remains uncertain.

  An analysis of the official data on donations received by national parties from  Gujarat  during the Financial Year 2024-25 reveals a staggering concentration of funding, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accounting for nearly the entirety of the contributions. The data, compiled in a document titled "National Parties donations received from Gujarat during FY-2024-25," lists thousands of transactions, painting a detailed picture of the financial backing for political parties from one of India’s most industrially significant states.

“What has gone wrong with the Congress? Why is it making such stupid demands? That’s the only reason why none trusts the party,” exclaimed someone close to me after reading a Gujarati daily report that the Congress had demanded the cow be declared India’s national animal.  

  A violent confrontation between Adivasi residents and a joint team of Forest Department, Revenue, and Police officials in Padaliya village, Banaskantha district, on 13 December 2025, was not a mere law and order breakdown but a direct consequence of the state's systemic failure to implement the Forest Rights Act (FRA), according to a damning fact-finding report released by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Gujarat.

  A few week ago, I was forwarded an article that  appeared  in the British weekly  The Economist . Titled “Caste and cuisine: From honeycomb curry to blood fry: India’s ‘untouchable’ cooking”, it took me back to what I had blogged about what was called a “ sattvik  food festival”, an annual event organised by former Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Anil Gupta.

  The other day, a discussion broke out among ten friends on love marriages—a contentious issue in Gujarat following moves in the corridors of power to regulate them by making parental consent mandatory. One of us claimed that, unlike in the past, nearly 70 percent of weddings today are love marriages. Another person, who had eloped to get married years ago, remarked, “Problems exist everywhere, whether it is a love marriage or an arranged one.”

  This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.

It is always sad when a journalist colleague passes away — more so when that person has remained firm in his journalistic moorings. Compared to many others, I did not know R.K. Misra, who passed away on February 23 after a long illness, very intimately, but we interacted occasionally over the years.

  Across the West, immigration has increasingly been framed as a cultural threat or a political liability, a stance most visibly associated with Donald Trump but echoed in varying degrees across Europe and other advanced economies. What this debate often ignores is a hard demographic and economic reality: without sustained immigration, much of the Western world faces a shrinking workforce, rising dependency ratios, and long-term stagnation.

  The  first page image  of the paper "Corona Virus Killed by Sound Vibrations Produced by Thali or Ghanti: A Potential Hypothesis" published in the  Journal of Molecular Pharmaceuticals and Regulatory Affairs , Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2020),  has gone viral  on social media in the wake of the controversy surrounding a Chinese robot presented by the  Galgotias University  as its original product at the just-concluded  AI summit in Delhi . The resurfacing of the 2020 publication, authored by   Dharmendra Kumar , Galgotias University, has reignited debate over academic standards and scientific credibility.

Decades ago, when I was a student at Delhi University, the Left-wing student organisations, one of which I was a part of, would hold a highly negative view of NGOs. They would go so far as to castigate them as imperialist or CIA agents -- just because they were foreign-funded, by bodies such as Amnesty, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace.