The fact that a regular convening of G-20-member countries and a rotational presidency for India has been converted into a carnival by the Narendra Modi government says more about the BJP’s art of politics than the summit’s importance. The hype around the G-20 is in line with the BJP’s messaging portraying the prime minister as a leader of unmatched global stature. Having said this, will the G-20 summit have any macro-economic significance for India?

News that the son of a rickshaw puller cracked the toughest engineering entrance exam or qualified to become an elite-class bureaucrat regularly feature on India’s media platforms. Such news represents both the equality and the inequality of India’s dynamic education sector. Equality because hard work of such candidates has paid off and education has been empowering for them and their families.

If you’ve been following the news in India, there is a slim chance you’d have missed the ongoing demolitions. The pace picked up in 2022, when the state used demolitions to deliver majoritarian forms of “justice.” While they have taken a particular form in Uttar Pradesh, the same methods have been deployed in Delhi, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Assam. On one hand, the charges of “illegal construction” are being directly used against Muslim minorities to further disenfranchize them.

The India-Australia relationship has long been characterized as natural but neglected. Natural because the two countries supposedly shared common democratic values and cultural pursuits which originate in a shared colonial history. Neglected because of diverging foreign policy interests dating to India’s Cold War stance of non-alignment and Australia’s alliance with the U.S.

Elaborating on his country’s new plan for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) in New Delhi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that “to achieve this (plan), India is an indispensable partner.” His remarks, delivered during his visit in March, underscored India and Japan’s “extremely unique position” in the current global order and their “great responsibility” in maintaining and strengthening it.