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.
Nikhil Anand became the first Associate Faculty Director of CASI on July 1, 2023. He is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power, and climate change. He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water.
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.
About the Seminar:
India’s security ties with the United States have traditionally commanded attention within the broader context of India’s foreign affairs. Although Indo-US security cooperation has matured over the last two decades in quantitative and qualitative terms, it takes a few dull moments for commentators to write the obituary of India-US relations. The oscillation between the extremes of “strong ties” and “frosty relations” makes it difficult to grasp the real-world complexities or the underlying phenomenon at play.
Professor Monika Arora is a public health scientist working in the area of Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Prevention and Control and Adolescent Health. She is Vice President (Research) at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). She also serves on the board of HRIDAY (Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth), an NGO working with and for adolescents, patients, and the community. She is the President-Elect of the NCD Alliance (2021-23), Chairperson of the South East Asia NCD Alliance (2020-23), and a Founding Governing Board member of the Healthy India Alliance.
The most recent Summit-level meeting of the four Quad nations—Australia, Japan, India, and the United States—in March 2023 began with a familiar refrain: “Our meeting today reaffirms the Quad’s steadfast commitment to supporting a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
In an interesting part of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), the protagonist (an ordinary clerk), distraught at being dehumanized and treated like “an invisible” by a high-ranking officer, decides to take revenge. He spends months trying to plot the perfect way to get back at the officer before coming up with “the most marvellous” idea: to confront the officer on Nevsky Prospect, a central street in St. Petersburg, where the clerk often spotted—and had stepped aside for—the officer in the past.
