Dear Readers,

Two images caught my attention this week.

One was of former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal visiting Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial at Rajghat to pay his respects, on the same day he announced a boycott of court proceedings in the Delhi excise policy case and spoke of his commitment to Satyagraha.

The other was of former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav visiting a Lucknow hospital to enquire about the health of BJP MLA Anupama Jaiswal. Jaiswal had been injured days earlier while setting fire to an effigy of the Samajwadi Party chief during a BJP-led Mahila Janakrosh March in Bahraich, held in support of the Centre’s Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam.

To Kejriwal first. He and Gandhigiri go hand in hand. He was the public face of the 2011 India Against Corruption movement, with its Gandhi-inspired hunger strikes at Jantar Mantar and its demand for a Jan Lokpal Bill. He has been photographed at Rajghat many times since.

Between those visits, the AAP shifted its iconography. Ahead of the 2022 Punjab election, party supporters demanded that Bhagat Singh and B.R. Ambedkar appear on currency notes. At the AAP’s national council meeting, Kejriwal declared the two would be the party’s param-aadarsh, or guiding lights. After the win, the BJP accused the AAP of replacing Gandhi’s portraits in Punjab government offices with those of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar.

In October 2022, Kejriwal wrote to the Centre, requesting that images of Lakshmi and Ganesha be printed on new currency notes alongside Gandhi. This came ahead of the Gujarat Assembly election and drew criticism as vote-bank politics. The Reserve Bank of India did not act on the suggestion. The status quo held, with only Gandhi on the currency.

This time, his Satyagraha was a demand that Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma recuse herself from the excise case. After Justice Sharma rejected the plea, he and former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia refused to appear before her court, neither in person nor through counsel. Kejriwal’s letter said his hope of getting justice had been shattered. While Kejriwal calls the standoff Gandhian, the Delhi High Court is, going by its detailed order, not pleased.

Meanwhile, in the BJP MLA versus Akhilesh Yadav case, the Samajwadi Party chief later posted on X: “We do not want fire to erupt among the people of society. We want showers of harmony to prevail in society. The healthy tradition of our positive politics has taught us exactly this…”

Three months ago, on Mahatma Gandhi’s 78th death anniversary on January 30, Akhilesh, while paying tribute to him, called for reviving Gandhian ideals to counter what he described as divisive and violent forces. With the 2027 Uttar Pradesh election approaching, the question arises: will we see more of such Gandhigiri in Uttar Pradesh?

This is all the more important for Akhilesh’s party, whose workers have often been accused of dadagiri. The charge stuck so hard that, ahead of the 2007 Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party coined the slogan: “Chadh gundon ki chhaati par, mohar lagao haathi par”—climb on the chest of the goons, stamp the ballot for the elephant (the BSP’s symbol).

This illustrates how quickly political narratives shift. Within months of Mayawati’s government being formed, detractors had altered the slogan, turning it into a debate over dadagiri versus sarkari dadagiri. The debate today is over “encounter raj” in Adityanath’s tenure, a record once advertised as decisive anti-criminal action.

But the larger picture is that, even in these times of polarised politics and a widening distance between the ruling party and the opposition, Gandhigiri works when netagiri and dadagiri fail.

I came across a news item that the Congress, at its lowest ebb in Bihar, will adopt Gandhigiri there. The party plans to use Gandhi’s methods, the Charkha (spinning wheel) and Shramdaan (voluntary labour), to connect with people and rebuild a base. Workers will be trained in batches of 100 at Sadakat Ashram, the party’s Patna office, with trainers brought in from Delhi and Wardha.

Rahul Gandhi has often reached for the same lexicon. In a Facebook message in 2018, he praised the women Congress workers led by Goa Mahila Congress chief Pratima Coutinho for their spirit of Gandhigiri after they were attacked by political rivals. The same year, the Indian Youth Congress released a video clip of Modi’s and Rahul’s parliamentary speeches under the caption “Dadagiri vs Gandhigiri”. The country would decide in 2019, the video noted.

Sections of the press read Rahul’s surprise hug of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament during the 2018 no-confidence debate as a gesture in the same vein. The Prime Minister did not look amused; the BJP termed it a show.

By contrast, Sanjay Dutt’s jadu ki jhappi in Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) was a hit. The film translated Gandhi’s principles, non-violence (ahimsa), truth (satya), and civil disobedience, into modern problems. Gandhigiri has remained a recurring Bollywood theme.

In 2010, the Indian Youth Congress organised a four-day leadership course for young leaders. They stayed in modest rooms at Gandhi Smriti to learn Gandhian principles and avoid luxuries. Rahul Gandhi had then asked them to do Gandhigiri and avoid chamchagiri (sycophancy).

Public representatives from different parties have, on various occasions, reached for non-violent Gandhian methods to make their voices heard. In January 2025, an MLA from the Bharat Rashtra Samithi in Telangana saw his supporters confronting an official at a Gram Sabha; he stepped in with folded hands and asked the officials to ensure schemes for all beneficiaries.

A few months earlier, in September 2020, an MLA from Maharashtra had taken the script further. A video of him went viral on social media: he was honouring a bank official by placing flowers at his feet and a scarf around his neck, in protest against the manager’s slow work. The Marathi press called it a Gandhigiri andolan.

During the early COVID-19 lockdown, MLA Adesh Singh Chauhan from Jaspur in Uttarakhand handed out roses to constituents while urging them to maintain physical distancing.

Bihar contributed one of the more unforgettable images. In November 2016, BJP MLA from Lauria, Vinay Bihari, turned up at the Assembly in shorts and a vest, his knees bruised from prostrating himself along the route. He had vowed not to wear a kurta-pyjama until a 44-km road in his West Champaran constituency was built. The Speaker, citing parliamentary shishtachar, denied him entry.

In 2021, BJP MLA Pradeep Patel of Mauganj, in Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa district, walked into the local electricity office, touched a junior engineer’s feet, and then spread a bedsheet on the officer’s chamber floor and lay there for hours. He had submitted a 67-point memorandum four days earlier.

The most striking set-piece may belong to Andhra Pradesh. In July 2022, Nellore Rural MLA Kotamreddy Sridhar Reddy, a member of the ruling YSR Congress and in effect protesting his own administration, sat for nearly an hour in knee-deep sewage water to demand the rebuilding of a bridge wall. Headlines duly anointed him the “people’s MLA”. In West Bengal, social media has often given the same treatment to Indian Secular Front MLA Naushad Siddiqui from Bhangar.

Officials, too, have had to pick up the rose. In December 2025, Goa’s Mormugao Municipal Council launched a recovery drive against commercial establishments that had ignored years of dues. Council officials walked into shops and banks across Vasco, handed out roses, asked owners to settle outstanding bills, and sealed the premises of those who refused. The chief officer, Siddhivinayak Naik, told the press he had tried the technique earlier in Margao, where, he said, a Rs.50 investment in roses had recovered nearly Rs.50 lakh. “People who owe dues will first receive a rose,” he said. “But if they still don’t respond, we may have to show them the thorns.”

Citizens have used the same language. In 2019, students at Jamia Millia Islamia handed flowers to police personnel at Jantar Mantar in Delhi after a campus crackdown. The image of Shreya Priyam Roy offering a rose to a helmeted officer travelled widely. How effective the gesture was is harder to argue.

From Rajghat to the bylanes of Nellore, from the chambers of assembly halls to the corridors of civic bodies, Gandhigiri still works.

At this stage, I am reminded of Majbooti Ka Naam Mahatma Gandhi, the published Gandhi Memorial Lecture by scholar-writer Purushottam Agrawal, delivered at the Gandhi Peace Foundation. Gandhi’s non-violence is not a weakness. Politicians realise this well, which is why Gandhigiri thrives.

How do you rate these four “aspects” of Indian politics: dadagiri, chamchagiri, netagiri, Gandhigiri? Bonus marks for brutal honesty.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Readers,

On April 19, amid the high-stakes West Bengal Assembly campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stopped at a snack shop in Jhargram for jhal muri, the familiar mix of puffed rice, onions, peanuts, spices and mustard oil, eaten as readily in Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha as in Bengal. He asked the price and settled for a Rs.10 serving.

Like the snack, the political conversations the event triggered were sharp, spicy, and pungent. Both social media and television channels went into a tizzy, with news anchors thronging the jhal muri shop, bringing an unusual spotlight on the vendor, Vikram Shaw, who had asked Modi if he eats onions—a standard ingredient in jhal muri. Modi cracked a joke: “Pyaaz khaate hain, dimag nahi khaate bas” (I eat onions; I don’t eat brains).

According to news reports, Vikram is from my hometown, Gaya, and, like scores of us, has ventured out to big cities to make a living. He has found employment, as many have, selling jhal muri or frying pakoras—work that requires little investment and no university degree. He rose from the grassroots.

In Bihar, onions and garlic are still taboo in a number of families, especially among Brahmins and Baniyas (among the latter those with titles such as Sao, Agrawal, and Barnwal), the two castes that steadfastly support the BJP.

Onions have scripted powerful political stories. Governments have fallen when onion prices have risen. It is not without reason that we have a phrase in Hindi, “pyaj ke aansu” (the tears of onions). It was the skyrocketing price of onions in 1998 that contributed to the defeat of the BJP in Delhi, making Sheila Dikshit Chief Minister, a post she held for 15 years.

Coming back to the jhal muri episode: while Mamata Banerjee’s party dismissed it as a “staged drama” and a “photo op”, Modi, on high campaigning mode, said in Krishnanagar: “Jhal muri maine khayi, lekin jhal TMC ko lagi hai” (I had the spicy snack, but Trinamool Congress felt the heat). The word “jhal” in Bangla means spicy or pungent.

The Trinamool alleged that Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren and his wife, Kalpana Soren, had to return to Ranchi because their helicopter was denied permission to land in Jhargram during Modi’s extended stay to eat jhal muri. The Trinamool called this “Adivasi-birodhi” (anti-tribal).

Allegations that the entire event was stage-managed were backed by people pointing out that the shop looked brand-new, the racks were filled with neatly arranged bottles packed to the brim with ingredients, an unusual sight in a village shop.

Food on the election trail is a recurrent theme. Are our politicians great foodies or do they just talk about food during election season? Or is just our political reporters who obsess about food on the campaign trail.

A day after the jhal muri stop, a Delhi journalist friend posted on social media: “This video of the PM in Bengal having jhal muri from a roadside stall has clocked 100 million views within 24 hours on Instagram. Shows how campaigns that connect with food and local culture work better than structured events.”

At the other end, the shopkeeper in the nondescript town of Jhargram was inundated by visits from television crews and he switched off his phone, irritated by the same questions being asked over and over. He also let slip the information that his shop had been set up by Mamata.

But other shopkeepers and vendors have benefited with increased footfalls after politicians visit them.

In the Matia Mahal area of Old Delhi, one will be baffled by the many “Mohabbat Ka Sharbat” shops that sprang up after Rahul Gandhi visited one such shop in April 2023, during the month of Ramzan, after campaigning in Karnataka. Gandhi tried the Mohabbat ka Sharbat drink made with watermelon, rooh afza, milk, and crushed ice at a well-known street vendor’s stall near Jama Masjid.

During his Bharat Jodo Yatra, Gandhi had coined the phrase: “Nafrat ke bazaar mein, mohabbat ki dukaan khol raha hoon” (I am opening a shop of love in the market of hate). Today, multiple shops line the street, each with the same name. The confusion is such that finding the real “Mohabbat Ka Sharbat” is as difficult as finding real love.

Gandhi also had golgappas at Nathu Sweets in the Bengali Market and kebabs at Al Jawahar. And the food journalist Kunal Vijayakar, in April 2023, headlined his YouTube video of Gandhi’s street food binge as “Dilli ke Chole Bhature, Kabab aur Chatpati Chat with Rahul Gandhi“ and invited him for a similar outing in Mumbai.

In Delhi, there is a famous paan shop called “Pandey Paan” in North Avenue, frequented by politicians including Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Narendra Modi. And the famous Pappu Chaiwala near Assi Ghat in Varanasi is visited by politicians of all hues, especially during elections.

These shops have entered mainstream news outlets and Instagram with equal ease. Pandeyspaan.com mentions on its website that US President Barack Obama tasted Pandey’s famous paan at the banquet hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan during the Republic Day celebrations of January 2015. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, and his successor, Donald Trump, too got the same paan. The shop has a line displayed in bold at the entrance: “Paan Suppliers to Rashtrapati Bhavan”.

In March 2022, when Modi was concluding his election campaign for Uttar Pradesh, he had a cup of kulhad chai at Pappu’s after offering prayers at Kashi Vishwanath temple. Varanasi’s famous Chachi ki Kachori shop is another such stop. The BJP leader Smriti Irani visited the shop in 2010, after being made president of the BJP’s women’s wing. Many politicians, including Rajesh Khanna (former filmstar), Manoj Sinha (BJP), and Mohan Prakash (Congress) have visited the shop. Sales at Chachi ki Kachori and the nearby Pehelwan Lassi go up every election and political differences blur. The lassi shop, famous for rabari waali lassi, has been visited by Chief Minister Adityanath as well as Akhilesh Yadav; other visitors have included Arun Jaitley and Dharmendra Pradhan. After the demolition drive in Varanasi last year, both shops had to relocate.

But not all such visits end pleasantly.

In the Hindi belt, politicians have often landed in trouble over the issue of non-vegetarian food. In the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav, who had reached out to the fishermen and boatmen communities (Mallah, Navik, Nishad, Kevat) by aligning with Mukesh Sahani’s Vikassheel Insaan Party, posted a video of himself eating fish in his helicopter. The BJP seized on it, saying he was provoking sentiments during the Navratri period.

West Bengal is different. During the election campaign this month, a video of BJP leader Anurag Thakur eating fish—with the BJP lotus in the background—went viral. This was an apparent bid to counter Mamata Banerjee’s warning that the BJP would ban fish in West Bengal if it came to power.

Mamata’s jibe came after the recent episode when 14 Muslim youths were arrested in Varanasi in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh for eating chicken biryani on a boat in the Ganga during an iftar gathering. They were accused of throwing the bones into the river.

Politicians often like to be seen eating local food to add authenticity to their candidature. Visiting street food joints helps them shed the tag of being elite. This is a watered-down version of the more serious philosophy of the socialist Ram Manohar Lohia, who advocated that privileged castes must consciously de-class themselves and eat with and live alongside those considered “untouchable”.

While this grows more relevant as the chasm between the ruling class and the masses keeps widening, politicians like to pretend, at least during elections, that they are still rooted. The question is how seriously people take these sentiments.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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On April 15, the BJP reached a milestone in Bihar, installing its first Chief Minister in the State, Samrat Choudhary. Soon after taking the oath, Choudhary touched the feet of Nitish Kumar and later visited his official residence. A smart move by the new occupant of the top job.

Samrat, a Hindi word meaning “king”, is an auspicious name for a Chief Minister. But the coronation of the new Bihar Chief Minister was a low-key affair. Neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor Amit Shah attended the oath-taking ceremony, nor were Chief Ministers from other BJP-ruled States invited to share the stage.

Every attempt was made to ensure that no message went out that the BJP was celebrating the exit of Nitish Kumar, and that the Nitish cohort did not feel that there had been a power shift. The BJP understands that Bihar, often called the caste cauldron, is not Uttar Pradesh, and that “Kamandal” (Hindutva politics) is not big enough here to keep the “Mandal” (OBC politics) inside it. Here, the Mandal—rather Mandal II, which empowers intermediary castes—is primarily with the Janata Dal (United), even though the BJP’s subaltern Hindutva pitch has made some inroads.

And so the BJP took over Bihar quietly, with no small measure of trepidation about what lay ahead. Despite the nearly 20-year rule of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), “Bahar” (prosperity) eludes Bihar, while “Palayan” (migration) remains more the norm than the exception. Added to this is the fact that there is no longer a Nitish Kumar to carry the alliance forward on the shoulders of his goodwill.

But this is how the BJP has quietly captured power in States where neither the RSS’ reach was massive nor the saffron party’s Hindutva politics had strong traction. But alliances with socialist and caste parties have always helped the BJP widen its net, and the history goes back to the 1960s.

When the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, and the Socialist Party came together to field a single candidate in four Lok Sabha byelections in 1963, the results were spectacular. Three of them—J.B. Kripalani, Rammanohar Lohia, and Minoo Masani—won; and even though the Jana Sangh’s Deendayal Upadhyaya lost, the camaraderie continued.

In Bihar, socialist leaders like Karpoori Thakur worked closely with the Jana Sangh and helped it gain a foothold in the State by joining a non-Congress coalition—the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal—in 1967. The Jana Sangh had by then joined hands with socialists and communists not only in Bihar but also in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh.

This formed the bedrock of the 1971 pre-electoral Grand Alliance, which gathered the Jana Sangh, Swatantra Party, Congress (O), Praja Socialist Party, and Samyukta Socialist Party, a precursor to the formal formation of the Janata Party in January 1977, when the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Bharatiya Lok Dal, Socialist Party, and Congress (O) merged to contest the 1977 general election against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. They later parted ways, and the BJP was formed in 1980, but the expansion of the saffron party began then and continued.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Dalit-led Bahujan Samaj Party first joined hands with the BJP in 1995 and then again in 1997 and 2002, giving the BJP a certain acceptability among Dalits.

Currently, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh is allied with parties of socialist background and leanings in western Uttar Pradesh: the Rashtriya Lok Dal, headed by Jayant Chaudhary, the grandson of former Prime Minister and farmer leader Chaudhary Charan Singh; a faction of Apna Dal in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a party founded by Soneylal Patel in 1995 to fight against casteism and for social justice; the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP); and the Nishad Party, all commanding considerable clout among their respective caste constituencies.

In Bihar, even before Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan (then in the Janata Dal) became part of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1999, Nitish Kumar, as leader of the Samata Party, had hitched his wagon to the BJP after the party’s formation in 1994 and contested the 1996 and 1998 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar together, helping the BJP get a strong foothold in the State. That George Fernandes, Nitish’s senior in the party and a veteran with strong trade union roots, was also part of the alliance gave the saffron party a major boost at the time.

Paswan, who formed the Lok Janshakti Party in 2000 and quit the NDA in 2002, returned to the BJP alliance in February 2014, in a move akin to breaking the untouchability of the Narendra Modi-led BJP—this after Nitish Kumar, ending a 17-year-old relationship with the BJP, had walked out of the NDA in 2013.

But the BJP, just as it had welcomed Paswan after a gap of 12 years, kept its doors open for Nitish and let him rejoin the NDA fold twice after he had switched to the RJD-led opposition alliance. Amid these comings and goings of friends turned foes and foes turned friends, the BJP silently kept making inroads among Dalits and oppressed classes. And now it has a Chief Minister of its own, hailing from the oppressed caste of the Kushwaha or Koiri.

After Yadav and Kurmi, Kushwaha is the third most prominent OBC grouping. The Koiri community has in the past been inclined towards radical socialist politics, having produced the firebrand leader Jagdeo Prasad, known as the “Lenin of Bihar”. But the BJP has also kept another prominent Koiri leader, Upendra Kushwaha, in good humour, earlier making him a Union Minister and now placating him with a Rajya Sabha seat after he lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election. His Rashtriya Lok Morcha—which evolved from the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party and Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal—has been part of the NDA, helping the BJP gain acceptability among the agrarian Koiris.

The BJP similarly benefited in Karnataka from its alliance with Ramakrishna Hegde’s Lok Shakti in the late 1990s, and it gradually ate up the space of the entire Janata Parivar in the State. In 2006, it came to power by aligning with another Janata Parivar offshoot, the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S). In 2008, the BJP formed a government on its own in the State, the first by the saffron party in south India. The JD(S) is currently an NDA ally in Karnataka. Deve Gowda’s son, H.D. Kumaraswamy, is Union Minister of Heavy Industries and Steel in the Modi government.

In Haryana, when the BJP fell short of a majority to form a government after a hung Assembly in 2019, the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP), headed by Dushyant Chautala, great-grandson of Chaudhary Devi Lal, came to its rescue and enabled the BJP to form a government. Five years later, the BJP terminated its alliance with Dushyant Chautala’s party in March 2024. Chautala first lost the Deputy Chief Minister’s post and then was routed in the Assembly election.

Earlier, the BJP had also aligned with the Indian National Lok Dal, another Janata Party offshoot headed by Devi Lal’s son Om Prakash Chautala, in the Lok Sabha election of 1999 and the Haryana Assembly election of 2000. They came together again in 2009. Currently, the INLD and JJP are on the margins, and the BJP has gained at their expense.

Naveen Patnaik, son of former Janata Dal leader Biju Patnaik, founded the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in 1997 and aligned with the BJP for the 1998 Lok Sabha election. In 2000, the BJD-BJP alliance formed a government in Odisha with Naveen Patnaik as Chief Minister, dislodging the Congress that had ruled the State for a long time. The BJD-BJP alliance returned to power in 2004 as well, but broke apart in 2009 in the wake of communal violence against Christian minorities in 2007 and 2008. Over the next three elections—2009, 2014, and 2019—Patnaik won on his own, but the BJP gradually replaced the Congress as the principal opposition force and finally came to power in 2024, defeating the Patnaik-led BJD.

Like Nitish Kumar’s party in Bihar, the BJD too has been a one-man show for two decades, and like Nitish, Patnaik too appears to be receding from the picture.

The two States once ruled by Janata Party offshoots are now in the BJP’s kitty.

The trend of socialist parties powering the saffron surge, particularly in light of the BJP’s fierce opposition to the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution, is interesting. What do you think?

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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Dear Reader,

Can we call it the animal spirits of politics surfacing most vividly during elections, or is it a deeper hostility toward animals, as political leaders routinely drag them into verbal slugfests? Or is the path of politics simply too serpentine?

For years, BSP chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati famously used animal imagery to describe her political rivals. She likened the Congress and the BJP to Saanpnath (lord of snakes) and Naagnath (king of cobras), ruling out alliances with both. This, despite the BSP having entered a pre-poll alliance with the Samajwadi Party in 1993, with the BJP in 1995, and with the Congress in 1996.

This election season, the snake made another appearance, this time in Assam.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, addressing an election rally in Nilambazar in the Sribhumi district, described the BJP and the RSS as jehreele saanp (venomous snakes). Citing the Quran, Kharge said that if a poisonous snake crosses someone’s path during Namaz, the prayer should be stopped and the snake killed. “The RSS and the BJP are that poisonous snake,” he reportedly said. “If you do not kill them, you will not survive.”

The reaction was swift. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma called Kharge pagal (madman), saying he was “speaking like a madman” due to old age. The RSS responded by filing police complaints against Kharge at police stations in Dispur and Silchar. The BJP lodged a formal complaint with the Election Commission, accusing the Congress president of inciting communal hatred and violating the model code of conduct.

The venom of communal rhetoric that has seeped into the body politic of Assam and elsewhere is a larger, more troubling issue. But this episode brought back memories of an evocative poem by the noted Hindi poet Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan, better known as Agyeya.

Addressing a snake, he writes: Saanp, tum sabhya to huye nahin / Nagar mein basna bhi tumhe nahin aaya / Ek baat poochhoon (uttar doge?) / Tab kaise seekha dansna, vish kahan paaya (O snake, you did not become civilised / You did not learn to live in cities / May I ask a question—will you answer? / Then how did you learn to bite, and where did you get the venom?)

Beyond poetry, cinema too has long been fascinated with snakes. And politicians from the film world seem happy to carry that imagery into public life.

At Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally at Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata in March 2021, soon after joining the BJP, actor Mithun Chakraborty thundered: Aami joldhorao noi, bele borao noi… aami ekta jaat cobra, ek chhobol-ei chhobi (Do not mistake me for a harmless snake. I am a pure cobra—one strike and you become a photograph).

More recently, actor Vineet Kumar portrayed the cunning politician Gauri Shankar Pandey in the web series Maharani (SonyLIV), a character repeatedly referred to as Kala Naag (black cobra). The character confesses that while he may not be capable of doing anything constructive, he is certainly capable of destroying others.

Hindi cinema offers no shortage of such imagery. In Elaan-e-Jung (1989), Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s iconic dialogue endures: “Naag hoon main, kala naag. Saamne aa jaye to apne baap ko bhi das loon, phir yeh desh kya cheez hai” (I am a cobra, a black cobra. I can bite even my father if he stands in my way. What then is the country?)

And who can forget Amrish Puri in Na-Insaafi (1989), when his character warns the police commissioner who arrested him that the day this kala naag escapes the prison bars, no one will be spared?

Political rhetoric has matched cinematic excess. In 2018, then BJP president Amit Shah described opposition parties as snakes, mongooses, cats, and dogs, all climbing a banyan tree to escape the “Modi flood.”

The imagery is striking, considering that snakes, especially cobras, occupy a revered place in Hindu mythology. Generations grew up hearing stories of Naag Loka, of Vishnu resting on the thousand-hooded Anant Shesha in the cosmic ocean, or of the child Krishna subduing the venomous serpent Kaliya, who had poisoned the waters of the Yamuna. A Kaliyadaman ghaat in Vrindavan marks the spot where Krishna is believed to have danced on the serpent’s heads. There is also the story of Takshak, the serpent who bit King Parikshit to death—a punishment, as legend has it, for the king having placed a dead snake around the neck of a meditating sage. Takshak is considered the younger brother of Vasuki, the king cobra that adorns the neck of Shiva.

Nag Panchami is still celebrated across many villages in the Hindi belt. I recall the jaw-dropping stories of the feats of cobras during the festival. That was long before I got exposed to Bollywood experimenting with box office success with snake themes in films like Nagin (two films with the same name), Nagina, and, much later, Hisss. The snakes in Hindi cinema quickly assumed human form, unlike English-language films like Anaconda, Python, King Cobra, and Snake Island, which allowed snakes to remain terrifyingly serpentine.

Back in the world of politics, the imagery continues. In August 2024, Bihar JDU MLA Gopal Mandal called his own party colleagues, Bhagalpur MP Ajay Mandal, kaala naag (black cobra), crudely referring to his skin colour, and Bulo Mandal as gora naag. “Dono naag hain—ek gora naag, ek kaala naag. Un naagon se bachiyega” (Both of them are snakes. Be careful of them), he warned.

That episode recalled Rajendra Kumar’s double role in the 1972 film Gora Aur Kala. Rajendra Kumar, popularly known as Jubilee Kumar, played separated twin brothers distinguished by their skin colour. Whether the MLA had the film in mind or not, using snake imagery alongside colour distinctions was a step too far, raising uncomfortable questions of colour prejudice that Hindi cinema itself often perpetuated.

Mythologies will remain mythologies, and films will remain films. But snakes have increasingly slithered into the political imagination.

Is politics truly a snake pit, or do politicians, after snaking their way to success, simply find comfort in the metaphor?

Tell us what you think.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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Dear Reader,

BJP MP Nishikant Dubey’s remarks last week about Biju Patnaik being the “link” between Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the CIA during the 1962 Sino-Indian War, raised tempers in Odisha.

The BJP, wary that the controversy would damage it in a State that it first won on its own only in 2024, quickly went into damage-control mode. Senior BJP leaders from Odisha issued statements praising Biju Patnaik, while the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) condemned the BJP for insulting the legacy of a man known to his followers as “Biju Baba”, “Utkal Keshari” (Pride of Odisha), and “Bhoomi Putra”.

Biju Patnaik, who is popularly called the “Architect of Modern Odisha”, the “Tall Man of Odisha”, and the “Eagle of the Storm”, was a colossal figure who dominated the State’s politics for four decades, although he served as Chief Minister for two separate terms: 1961 to 1963, and 1990 to 1995. His son Naveen took over in 2000 and ruled until 2024.

Aware that Dubey’s remarks could give the BJD an issue to galvanise its workers, who have been numbed into shock by their defeat in the last Assembly election, the BJP used its State leaders, who are mainly imports from the BJD, to disassociate itself from Dubey’s comment. Baijayant Panda went so far as to say that “Biju uncle” was “one of the greatest patriots of modern Bharat” and that casting aspersions on his patriotism was “fantastical and patently ludicrous”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, was roped in. In his Utkal Divas message, he hailed Biju Patnaik for his commitment to nation-building.

But, condemning the “disrespectful” remarks, BJD MP Sasmit Patra resigned from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT headed by Dubey, and the BJD staged a walkout from the Rajya Sabha.

Biju is too revered in Odisha to be taken lightly. In 2008, the BJD demanded a Bharat Ratna for Biju , while in 2016 the Odisha Assembly passed a resolution seeking the same. He was reportedly the only Indian whose coffin was draped in the national flags of India, Indonesia, and Russia.

Realising he was in hot water, Dubey issued a statement on April 1 saying: “Biju Babu has always been and will remain a towering statesman for us. If my statement has hurt anyone’s sentiments, I unconditionally apologise. First of all, this statement is my personal view. My thoughts on Nehru ji were misconstrued as being about Biju Babu.”

The BJP is shrewd enough to know that it can fight Biju’s son Naveen in an election but it cannot survive in Odisha if it slights the legacy of a figure revered as a symbol of Odia pride.

The episode is a reminder that even in these times of polarised politics, a handful of politicians still command respect across party lines, and opposition parties are wary of targeting them.

I saw this first-hand during my coverage of the Bihar Assembly election in November 2025, widely billed by the JD(U) as Nitish Kumar’s last electoral battle.

After an initial offensive against him—when barbs like “Paltu Ram” were hurled, his physical and mental health was questioned, and there was speculation about whether he would last the term—the RJD stepped back. Its leaders toned down the rhetoric and began telling voters that the BJP would ease Nitish out after the election, with some even floating the possibility of a post-election tie-up with the man. The earlier attacks had, in other words, begun to yield diminishing returns.

Another leader who command supports across party lines is Sharad Pawar, as seen during the recent Rajya Sabha election from Maharashtra. All three constituents of the Maha Vikas Aghadi—the Shiv Sena (UBT), the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar faction), and the Congress—initially staked a claim to the lone MVA seat. But despite initial objections from Aaditya Thackeray, the alliance unanimously backed Pawar. His election was uncontested even by the BJP. That Pawar has friends across parties is no secret, even if his cross-party appeal is of a different kind from Biju Patnaik’s legacy.

When, in 2017, Prime Minister Modi targeted former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the Rajya Sabha, saying “Dr Sahab is the only person who knows the art of bathing in a bathroom with a raincoat on”—a reference to Singh’s clean personal image amid the UPA-era corruption scandals—many in political circles felt the attack brought the BJP little benefit. Singh himself refused to comment. The entire Opposition closed ranks.

So too with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom the opposition long described as “the right man in the wrong party”. Jawaharlal Nehru famously predicted in the 1950s that the young Vajpayee would one day become Prime Minister. Later, in the 1980s, Rajiv Gandhi facilitated Vajpayee’s medical treatment for a kidney ailment by including him in an official government delegation to the US.

Targeting such individuals is, in the competitive electoral arithmetic of today’s India, akin to targeting a community—every vote counts.

Bal Thackeray, who has become a symbol of Marathi pride, is another personality the Opposition has always been reluctant to target directly, more so after his death. When Eknath Shinde parted ways from the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena, he made a point to assert that the senior Thackeray had never compromised his principles.

Even former NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal—who was once keen to arrest Thackeray, according to former Anti-Terrorism Squad chief K.P. Raghuvanshi’s memoir Troubleshooter—was defensive enough about the episode to publicly clarify that he had ensured the police did not oppose Thackeray’s bail and offered Matoshree, the Thackeray residence, as a temporary detention facility. Being seen as aggressively anti-Thackeray carries electoral costs.

Similarly, Congress leader Sushilkumar Shinde wrote in his memoir, Five Decades in Politics, that while he could not justify Thackeray’s politics or the methods he used, he had cordial relations with the Sena chief.

Farmers have such an emotional connect with former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh that even four decades after his death, politicians across parties refrain from attacking him, although his son Ajit Singh and grandson Jayant Singh attract regular barbs. The Modi government conferred the Bharat Ratna on Charan Singh months before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and later entered an alliance with his party in western Uttar Pradesh.

“Tau” Devi Lal of Haryana was another such figure, known for personal relationships that cut across party lines. His “pagri watt bhai” (brothers by the exchange of turbans) bond with Shiromani Akali Dal leader Parkash Singh Badal helped ease the frequently strained relations between Haryana and Punjab.

As much as one might rebel against personality politics, people with charisma always matter in politics. Almost every party swears by B.R. Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, and Karpoori Thakur, while all non-Congress parties want to be seen as heirs of Jayaprakash Narayan. And, of course, everyone wants to own Mahatma Gandhi, even though the BJP’s foot soldiers throw vitriol at the Mahatma and hold mock shootings of his effigy.

Dubey’s quick retreat and apology confirm that even in an era of muscular political messaging, some legacies are simply not worth the fight.

Write in with your thoughts on the personality cult in Indian politics.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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Dear Reader,

Gandhiji said “be the change”. Indian politicians, it seems, have settled for changing the name.

The latest addition to this long tradition comes from Praveen Khandelwal, the BJP’s Lok Sabha member from Chandni Chowk. He has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah proposing that Delhi be rechristened Indraprastha, in order, as he put it, to restore the city’s ancient civilisational identity. The letter arrived a day after the Union Cabinet approved a proposal to rename Kerala as “Keralam”.

Khandelwal went further. He proposed renaming the Old Delhi Railway Station as “Indraprastha Junction” and the Indira Gandhi International Airport as “Indraprastha Airport”. He also suggested installing statues of the Pandavas at Purana Qila to, in his words, revive the city’s ancient cultural heritage. Arguing that the name Delhi came into use only during the medieval period, he said Indraprastha—the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata—represents the city’s civilisational origins.

Drawing on past renaming exercises, he cited Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Prayagraj as precedents. He also wrote separately to Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta urging the Delhi Assembly to pass a resolution in support of the change. It was not his first attempt. He had made the same demand a few months earlier, making this his second push within a year.

This is not a new idea, even for Delhi. Before Khandelwal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Delhi unit had sent a seven-point recommendation to Delhi Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra, seeking to rename the Indira Gandhi International Airport as Indraprastha International Airport and the Delhi Railway Station as Indraprastha Railway Station.

In November 2025, at Purana Qila, Mishra released a song called “Ye Indraprastha hai”. This was a five-minute rendition celebrating the ancient name. A cultural organisation had started an Indraprastha Festival at the same venue in 2016.

The name Indraprastha, meanwhile, has long circulated without formal endorsement. Delhi’s compressed natural gas supplier, Indraprastha Gas Ltd, uses it. There is a metro station by the same name on the Blue Line. In February 2026, two metro stations in Delhi were renamed—among them Mayur Vihar Pocket 1, which became Shri Ram Mandir Mayur Vihar.

Name changes in Delhi have a pattern of their own. Roads named after rulers spanning centuries—Ashoka Road, Aurangzeb Road, Tughlak Road—encoded a certain reading of history, but in 2015, Aurangzeb Road was renamed Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road.

Renames rarely settle matters; they tend to invite fresh disputes. In December 2019, the Delhi government renamed the Pragati Maidan metro station as Supreme Court metro station. A public interest petition followed, seeking that the station’s Hindi signage be changed from “Supreme Court” to “Sarvoch Nyayalaya” in Devanagari script, on the grounds that the Central Secretariat station was rendered as “Kendriya Sachivalaya” in Hindi, and that the Supreme Court itself uses “Bharat ka Sarvoch Nyayalaya” on its official website. An exasperated Delhi Metro Rail Corporation later told the Delhi High Court it opposed the change, citing the financial burden on the public exchequer.

Connaught Place was officially renamed Rajiv Chowk in 1995, in memory of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. When the idea was first mooted, local traders protested vigorously, fearing that changing the name of such a recognisable address would undermine its identity and hurt their business. Decades later, most Delhiites still call it Connaught Place, or simply CP. The metro station built beneath it adopted the new name in 2013; the place itself did not.

The Mughalsarai railway junction in Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the oldest and busiest in the country, was renamed Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction in August 2018, after years of political pressure from the BJP, which has ties to the Hindu nationalist ideologue who died under disputed circumstances near the station in 1968. The township itself was renamed Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar the same year. People in the region still say Mughalsarai.

Renaming Bombay as Mumbai, Calcutta as Kolkata, Bangalore as Bengaluru, and Trivandrum as Thiruvananthapuram (arguments for shedding anglicised colonial legacies and restoring indigenous names) took years of political pressure and public negotiation. Even so, old usages continue in everyday speech, in legal addresses, in public memory.

In my home State of Bihar, in 2024, a BJP legislator demanded that Bakhtiyarpur railway station be renamed, arguing it was named after Bakhtiyar Khilji, the Turkish military commander who destroyed the ancient Nalanda University in 1193. Union minister Giriraj Singh backed the demand. “Our government will remove all symbols of servitude in Bihar,” Singh said. But BJP’s ally, the Janata Dal (United), rejected the demand. A JD(U) spokesperson said the town was named after the Sufi saint Bakhtiyar Kaki, not the commander. Nitish Kumar, whose home constituency this is, has declined to pursue the renaming.

Then came Karachi Bakery. In 2025, as India-Pakistan tensions escalated following the Pahalgam terror attack, protests erupted at bakery outlets in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. Demonstrators demanded the name be changed. What the protesters either did not know or chose to overlook was straightforward: the bakery was founded in 1953 in Hyderabad by Khanchand Ramnani, a Hindu Sindhi who had migrated from Karachi after Partition. It was an act of nostalgia for a lost hometown. “Karachi Bakery is a 100 per cent Indian brand,” the owners said in a public statement. “Our name is part of our history, not our nationality.”

The logic the protesters employed could, if applied consistently, prove inconvenient. There is a Rawalpindi Jewellers in Noida. And what of Mysore Pak, the south Indian sweet? Or the tart, cumin-heavy Lahori Jeera? The question might sound rhetorical but tests where the renaming impulse stops, and why.

Some organisations, including the Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha, have demanded that Meerut be renamed Maya Rashtra or even Pandit Nathuram Godse Nagar. There have been calls to rename Ghaziabad and Hapur as Digvijay Nagar and Avaidyanath Nagar, respectively, after former heads of the Gorakhnath Math. Chief Minister Adityanath is the current head of the Math.

In Uttarakhand’s capital Dehradun, when the Pushkar Singh Dhami government moved to rename the Miyanwala locality as Ramjiwala, local residents, most of them Hindu, protested. The government had apparently taken Mianwala for a Muslim name. It is not. The name derives from a 17th-century Rajput title. The residents knew their history better than their politicans.

But changing the name of a road or a building is different in kind from changing the name of an entire city— or a Union Territory with a population of over 30 million. Delhi’s identity is plural and layered, and its older names, Dhillika, Dehli, are well established in the historical record. The city was many things before the Mughals arrived, and many more things after.

Many Urdu poets and writers appended “Dehlavi” or “Dilli” to their names as a mark of belonging—Daagh Dehlvi, Tabish Dehlvi, Gulzar Dehlvi, Sahir Dehlavi, Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, Bekhud Dehlavi. If the city’s name changes, what becomes of these pen names? And what of Allahabad High Court, which was not renamed when the city became Prayagraj? The institutional name remains, a reminder that renaming and reality do not always travel together.

The Persian proverb “Hanuz Dilli Dur Ast”—“Delhi is still far away”—carries more than its literal meaning. It is attributed to the 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, who is said to have spoken these words when the Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq vowed to punish him on his return from a military campaign. The Sultan died before reaching the city. The proverb lives on, and it may outlast the signage too.

Justice Markandey Katju once acidly proposed that governments rename 30 Indian cities he characterised as carrying Mughal associations, but, he declared, “We Allahabadis will continue calling it Allahabad, come what may.”

The Zimbabwean-British author Alexandra Fuller, writing about the African landscape in her memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, said that the land is indifferent to its name. “You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking. It doesn’t care.”

Urdu poet Nida Fazli said it more gently: “Raston ke naam, waqt ke chehre badal gaye; ab kya batayen kisko kahan chhorh aaye hain”—the names of paths, the faces of time, have changed; what can we say now of who we left behind, and where.

Do you think this renaming frenzy is meaningful? Or a charade that changes signboards while leaving everything else untouched?

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

We hope you have been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in

Dear Readers,

In the ongoing Budget session, the farmer question was back in focus—this time with an eye on election-bound West Bengal. And why not: political parties always remember farmers, the annadatas, each time elections are around the corner.

Last week Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan hit out at the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal, accusing her and her party of doing “petty politics” and “committing a sin” by blocking central schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana and the National Mission on Natural Farming and thereby making farmers suffer. Chouhan asserted that once a BJP government came into the State, it would implement all schemes and ensure that farmers received their rightful benefits.

However, all indications suggest that Mamata is not out yet, even as her party seeks a consecutive fourth term in West Bengal. In 2011, Mamata ended the 34-year rule of the Left Front in Bengal, and has not looked back since. But the BJP has a formidable election machinery, and West Bengal tops its wish list. How effective its machinery is in Bengal will be the question.

Mamata first stormed to power by centring farmers and farmland in 2011. She made the Left Front government appear as though it had compromised the interests of farmers in favour of the industry lobby and led massive protests when the then Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced the setting up of a Tata Motors car factory at Singur in 2006.

The turning point came in March 2007, when 14 villagers, including two women, were killed in police firing in Nandigram in Purba Medinipur district. They were protesting against the alleged attempts at land acquisition by the Left Front government to set up a chemical hub. “Jami amra chharbuni” (we will not leave our lands) became the war cry of the protestors. The killings sparked a violent agitation that lasted over one and a half years and hastened the end of Left Front rule in the State. On October 3, 2008, Ratan Tata too pulled out from the plan to set up a factory at Singur in Hooghly district.

When Didi came to power in 2011, she moved to convert that political capital into policy. She announced that the farmland in Singur would be returned to the original owners, a move that was implemented in 2016 after the Supreme Court declared the land acquisition illegal. Mamata has leaned into this position even as questions persist about the pragmatism of forcing the Tatas to withdraw from Singur and even as the BJP tries to project her as anti-industry.

If, in a State where youth unemployment is high, Mamata has stuck to burnishing her pro-farmer credentials, then her focus is not accidental. Land is an emotive subject in West Bengal, as it is across India. This is especially true in the eastern and central regions where agriculture is the chief source of livelihood. One recalls Trinamool’s surcharged “Ma, Mati, Manush” (Mother, Land, and People) campaign.

The politics surrounding farmers and farmland has often led to voter polarisation, a pattern that goes beyond West Bengal. In November 2021, when the Modi government announced the repeal of the three contentious farm laws—after massive protests by farmers, mainly from Punjab, and the exit of NDA ally Shiromani Akali Dal in September 2020—Modi finally said he regretted that his government “could not convince” farmers of the benefits of the laws.

The government’s decision to withdraw the laws came just months before elections in the agrarian States of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in 2022. The farmer protests had resonated in Bengal as well, before the Assembly election of 2021, and the Trinamool had romped home to power for a third consecutive time. This was despite the BJP making significant gains in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in West Bengal with 18 seats, a sharp rise from the two seats it won in 2014. Based on that experience, the BJP is making the right noises this time around.

There is precedent here too. Months after coming to power in 2014, the BJP had pushed through the contentious land ordinance bill, which sought to change key provisions, including the consent clause and social impact assessment, in the 2013 Land Acquisition Act, and replace the term “private company” with ‘private entity’. But It was eventually allowed to lapse before the 2015 Bihar election, which the BJP went on to lose. Later that year, the Modi government renamed the Union Agriculture Ministry as the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.

In 2018, the BJP had lost power in Madhya Pradesh after simmering farmer anger over the killing of six farmers in police firing in Mandsaur in 2017 during the farmers’ protests. The Congress had capitalised on their anger and made the Mandsaur killings a central political issue, promising farm loan waivers, farmer pensions, a rebate in the registration fee for land documents, and MSP for crops as per the M.S. Swaminathan Committee report.

As the West Bengal election nears, the same rhetoric is heard again, circling back to farmers, crops, and farmlands, each speech staking a fresh claim to get the support of the annadatas. It is quite a history of the steady cultivation of political yield.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

We hope you have been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in

Dear reader,

With 37 Rajya Sabha seats across 10 States going to the vote on March 16, both the NDA and the INDIA bloc are on tenterhooks—counting heads, watching backs, and hoping their members’ consciences stay conveniently quiet until the ballots are cast.

As always, the ruling alliance holds the structural advantage. But a keen contest is on the cards in Bihar and Odisha, and some turbulence is visible in Maharashtra, where allies have competing ambitions and long histories.

Since no party whip can be issued for Rajya Sabha elections directing members to vote for any specific candidate, the appeal to “conscience vote”—antaratma ki awaz—often yields creative and consequential decisions, whose impact lingers long after the election.

Technically speaking, it is a void gesture, but that has not stopped parties from issuing one anyway. Both the BJD and the Congress have directed their members to be present in Bhubaneswar through voting day. “All BJD members are directed not to leave headquarters and be present in Bhubaneswar from March 13 to March 16 without fail,” said BJD chief whip Pramila Mallick—amid growing indications that members of rival parties might abet each other’s arithmetic through the strategic gift of absenteeism.

In Odisha, the BJD has fielded two candidates for four vacant seats: former corporate executive Santrupt Misra and urologist Datteswar Hota—despite having the numbers to send only one MP to the Rajya Sabha. Of the four seats falling vacant, two had been held by the BJP and two by the BJD. After the BJP’s commanding victory in the 2024 Odisha Assembly election, the BJD can realistically win no more than one.

The Assembly math is unambiguous: the BJP holds 79 of 147 seats, with support from three Independents; the BJD has 48 (two members were suspended earlier this year); the Congress has 14; and the CPI(M) one. The BJD will have approximately 18 surplus first-preference votes after securing one seat for Misra. With Congress and CPI(M) backing Hota as a “common candidate”, the opposition could yet claim the fourth seat—an outcome that would be quietly embarrassing for the ruling BJP on its own turf.

Hence, the BJP has thrown its weight behind Dilip Ray, a hotelier and former Union Minister who held the coal portfolio under the NDA governments between 1996 and 2000, contesting as an Independent.

In his nomination announcement, Naveen Patnaik made the case for Hota with characteristic restraint: “The second candidate for the fourth seat is a common candidate, Dr Datteswar Hota, a renowned doctor from Odisha, who was the first Vice Chancellor of the Odisha University of Health Sciences and was also the principal of SCB Medical College. Since he is a common candidate, I appeal to all parties to support him and send him to the Rajya Sabha.”

It is a moment of déjà vu for Ray and for Odisha politics alike. In 2002, after being expelled from the BJD, Ray pulled off a sensational Rajya Sabha victory with BJD and BJP legislators defying their party lines to back him. The Naveen Patnaik of today is a considerably diminished figure, and the Congress is likewise enfeebled. The question is whether the two parties can hold their respective flocks together this time.

Two suspended BJD legislators and BJD MLA Subasini Jena—whose husband Rabindra Jena, a former BJD leader, joined the BJP on March 11—will be closely watched. The past is inconvenient, and the fourth seat will likely be decided by precisely that kind of personal inconvenience.

In Bihar, the RJD has renominated its outgoing Rajya Sabha MP, Patna-based businessman Amarendra Dhari Singh, for one of five vacant seats. The numbers are brutal: the RJD has 25 MLAs; the broader Mahagathbandhan, including the Congress and the Left, commands 35. With 41 first-preference votes required to win a seat in the 243-member Bihar Assembly, Singh’s victory depends entirely on all five AIMIM legislators and the lone BSP MLA voting for him—parties the Grand Alliance has not exactly courted with warmth.

The NDA, with 202 MLAs, will easily secure four seats and has votes to spare for the fifth. Whether the non-NDA opposition can hold together is far from certain. In the 2025 Bihar Assembly election, the AIMIM’s request to join the Mahagathbandhan was snubbed by the RJD—a slight Owaisi’s party has not forgotten. And in 2022, the RJD had poached four of the five AIMIM MLAs who had won in 2020 from the Seemanchal region. The bill for that manoeuvre may yet come due.

Meanwhile, the JD(U) national general secretary Ashok Choudhary claimed on March 12 that the NDA had “12 extra votes” in its kitty—declining to specify their provenance, which is itself a kind of answer.

There was also an earlier tussle within the NDA. Both Jitan Ram Manjhi of the Hindustan Awam Morcha (Secular) and Upendra Kushwaha of the Rashtriya Lok Morcha had sought the alliance’s Rajya Sabha nomination. “We were promised two Lok Sabha seats and one Rajya Sabha seat. We are confident that the BJP leadership will honour its commitment,” Manjhi had said. The NDA ultimately nominated Kushwaha. Manjhi, accustomed to receiving commitments, remains an interested observer.

In Maharashtra, after considerable internal pressure from all three constituents of the Maha Vikas Aghadi, the alliance finally settled on Sharad Pawar as its candidate for the lone Rajya Sabha seat it can realistically win. Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aditya Thackeray had backed the incumbent Priyanka Chaturvedi, arguing that Sena (UBT), the largest MVA partner, deserved the seat. The Congress, for its part, had placed its own claim.

Adding to the friction: reports that the two NCP factions had begun talking about a possible merger ahead of local body elections prompted a miffed Thackeray to cite it as one of his reasons for questioning Pawar’s candidacy. Whether this was a principled objection or a negotiating tactic is a question the MVA preferred not to ask too loudly.

Haryana has earned a singular reputation in Rajya Sabha history for producing drama that outlasts the elections themselves. Three candidates are in the field for two vacant seats: BJP’s Sanjay Bhatia, Congress’ Karamvir Singh Boudh, and Satish Nandal, a BJP State vice president contesting as an Independent. In the 90-member Assembly, the BJP has 48 MLAs, Congress 37, INLD 2, and 3 Independents. A candidate requires 31 votes.

The BJP, having secured Bhatia’s seat with its 48, has 17 votes to spare. If those votes—combined with the three Independent MLAs and the two INLD legislators—flow to Nandal, he would reach 22. He would still need eight Congress MLAs to cross-vote, which is precisely what the BJP is likely hoping for. Congress fielding the relatively lesser-known Boudh, passing over party veterans like Ashok Tanwar and Uday Bhan, has its own risks.

In June 2016, BJP-backed independent and media baron Subhash Chandra won a Haryana Rajya Sabha seat after 12 Congress MLAs’ votes were declared invalid—they had used unauthorised pens rather than the violet sketch pens supplied by the Returning Officer. The episode, which became known as the “inkgate” scandal, resulted in an FIR against the Assembly’s then-secretary, R.K. Nandal, who had served as the Returning Officer. Supreme Court advocate R.K. Anand, who lost that election, subsequently filed a police complaint against Chandra, alleging a conspiracy to ensure his defeat through the wrong pens being distributed to Congress legislators.

Six years later, in June 2022, history found a way to rhyme. Congress candidate Ajay Maken lost to BJP-backed Independent Kartikeya Sharma—son of former Congress leader Venod Sharma—by a margin of less than a single vote, after one of Maken’s votes was cancelled. The Congress, having already declared victory on social media, was obliged to withdraw its celebratory posts. Humiliation, in Haryana, is biennial.

The February 2024 elections to 15 Rajya Sabha seats across Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Himachal Pradesh were marked by cross-voting in all three States, despite three-line whips being issued.

The most dramatic of these was Himachal Pradesh, where six Congress MLAs voted for the BJP candidate, defying a three-line whip directing them to back the party’s nominee, Abhishek Singhvi. The result was a tie—both the BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan and Singhvi received 34 votes each in the 68-member Assembly. The seat was decided by a draw of lots, in favour of Mahajan.

In Karnataka, a BJP MLA, S.T. Somashekar, crossed over to vote for the Congress candidate Ajay Maken, while another BJP MLA, Shivaram Hebbar, abstained—bringing that particular variety of embarrassment to the BJP.

But the episode that has lodged itself most firmly in the institutional memory of Rajya Sabha watchers is the August 2017 Gujarat election, in which the Congress flew 44 of its MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru to forestall poaching—only for two of the MLAs, once back in Gujarat, to show their marked ballots to a BJP election agent before depositing them in the BJP’s favour. After a late-night standoff, the Election Commission invalidated the two rebel votes. Ahmed Patel won the seat. The matter went to the Supreme Court. Patel died in November 2020—of COVID-19 complications—before the legal proceedings could conclude. The BJP won the seat in a by-election in 2021.

As the Rajya Sabha election heads into its final hours—with a rare BJD-Congress alignment in Odisha, alliance calculations under strain in Bihar, and unresolved claims in Maharashtra—the House of Elders is, as usual, being populated through methods that would give most elders a pause.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

We hope you have been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in

Dear Reader,

Indian politics often carries an element of surprise, more so when it involves Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose political journey has been marked by sudden somersaults.

This time too, Kumar surprised everyone—including many in his own party—by first announcing his decision to contest for the Rajya Sabha and then swiftly filing his nomination on March 5, paving the way for a new government in the State, likely to be headed by a BJP leader for the first time in Bihar’s history.

That Nitish Kumar would serve out his full term had always seemed questionable, even though the NDA swept to power in the November 2025 Bihar Assembly election under his leadership. That the arrangement would unravel so soon, under four months, is the surprise.

Most leaders of the opposition RJD—and, reportedly, even Nitish Kumar’s family members—had no inkling of what was to come, a drama that quickly culminated with Kumar signing his Rajya Sabha nomination papers in Patna, with Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP national president Nitin Nabin in attendance.

Expectedly, RJD raised the obvious objection: what, they demanded, had become of the promise embedded in the slogan “Pachis se tees; Ek baar phir Nitish” (From 2025 to 2030, only Nitish)?

Social media captured the outrage in Kumar’s home district Nalanda and across Bihar. Supporters were unwilling to accept the explanation he offered on X—that contesting the Rajya Sabha fulfilled a long-held personal wish: to have been a member of both Houses of the Bihar Legislature and of Parliament. Outside 1, Anne Marg, JDU workers vandalised the party office and accused unnamed “conspirators” of forcing the decision.

JDU leader Pratibha Singh protested alongside women workers, warning that if Nitish Kumar was pushed out of Bihar under any pressure, his women supporters would commit self-immolation. “You were Chief Minister till 2030, you are Chief Minister now and you will remain so,” she declared, before adding: “I do not know what conspiracy, what pressure this is.”

In a political reporter’s life, such moments do arrive—though not often. The nearest parallel that came to mind was May 2004, when Sonia Gandhi declined the Prime Ministership after the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) unexpected election victory and anointed Manmohan Singh in her place. As reporters queued outside her residence at 10, Janpath, her supporters went into overdrive—weeping, holding portraits, pleading. Not to be left behind, Congress members joined in. A former MP, Gangacharan Purohit, climbed on the roof of a car and threatened to commit suicide if she did not take the post. The then All India Congress Committee general secretary for Bihar threatened to go on a hunger strike.

Sonia Gandhi’s decision—taken in the face of an intense BJP campaign against her “foreign origin”—was described by the party as an act of her “inner voice”. The party called it her supreme sacrifice. Later, other accounts entered the public domain, offering less elevated explanations.

In the present case, Kumar too reached for the language of finality, expressing gratitude to the people of Bihar for more than two decades of support while assuring them of his full cooperation and extending guidance to the government. That he will be a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from Bihar is, of course, a detail in which his supporters find cold comfort.

The rumour mills are churning. Somebody dug up an old video of Union Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, who in November 2023 had alleged that poisonous substances were being mixed into the food served to Nitish Kumar by those who coveted his chair.

But, spectacle aside, Kumar’s exit marks something consequential. It signals the formal end of the troika that defined Bihar politics for a generation: Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Ram Vilas Paswan. Lalu cannot contest elections, convicted as he is in the fodder scam cases. Paswan died in 2020. Now with Nitish leaving, an era has closed.

The BJP kept Nitish Kumar in the Chief Minister’s chair despite holding more seats in the Assembly than the JDU—in both 2020 and 2025. It was patience, not deference. The party knew that in Bihar’s three-way contest—JDU, RJD, and BJP—it could eventually come to power on its own terms only if it did not antagonise Kumar’s constituency prematurely.

I recall asking, in July 2017, the then most prominent Bihar leader from the BJP, Sushil Kumar Modi, why he was helping Nitish Kumar by training fire only on Lalu Prasad. He recalled how JDU workers and BJP supporters had shared the same political trenches for years, and how amicable the relationship had been. The question, put directly, was whether the BJP had recognised that it had reached the ceiling of its own vote base in Bihar and could not come to power without an alliance or a credible face. Modi did not quite answer. In August that year, Nitish broke with the RJD and rejoined the NDA.

Even through the decade of Nitish Kumar’s dizzying alliance shifts, the BJP leadership never seriously entertained the idea of cutting him loose. They waited for the right moment. And so, despite his visibly failing health in the run-up to the 2025 polls, the party did not sideline him. Bihar’s voters—perhaps sensing this was Kumar’s last election—gave the NDA a massive mandate. His women voters, whom he had carefully cultivated over two decades, were a central part of that coalition.

The RJD-led opposition, tellingly, also pulled its punches in the final stages of the campaign, refraining from attacking Kumar personally and instead drawing repeated comparisons to Maharashtra, where Chief Minister Eknath Shinde was dropped immediately after the NDA’s 2024 Assembly victory and handed the deputy’s post as consolation.

To its credit, the BJP avoided a crude repeat of the Maharashtra script—Shinde was dispatched with unseemly haste; Kumar has been accorded at least the courtesy of a story about personal aspiration. But it remains unmistakably the same story: a Chief Minister from a smaller ally, electorally elevated, politically removed.

Call him “Sushasan Babu” or “Paltu Kumar”—Nitish Kumar has left a mark on Bihar’s politics that will not fade quickly. He broke caste barriers sufficiently to assemble a durable multi-caste constituency, and included both women and Extremely Backward Classes. Whether the BJP has a face capable of holding that coalition together, let alone expanding it, is the question Bihar politics will spend the next several years answering.

I remember a former RJD State president, Jagdanand Singh, once telling me during the UPA years how easy it would be for leaders from his party and the JDU to cross over to each other, given how similar their social and political outlooks were. I watched this play out over the years—Sharad Yadav, once JDU president, joined the RJD in March 2022 after Nitish sidelined him; JDU national general secretary Mangani Lal Mandal joined the RJD in January 2025 and later replaced Singh as the party’s State president.

I remember my bafflement when I called a relatively junior leader from one party and was told that they had crossed to the other party. Lalu Prasad’s one-time close aide Shyam Razak—who left the RJD, joined the JDU, was expelled, rejoined the RJD, and then rejoined the JDU—is a case in point.

Will Nitish Kumar’s absence trigger an exodus of Extremely Backward Class (EBC) leaders from the JDU? Could they drift towards the RJD, widening that party’s social ambit the way the Samajwadi Party did in Uttar Pradesh in 2024? Will the BJP move fast enough to consolidate its own EBC reach before the JDU haemorrhages? Or will the party absorb the shock and emerge with a tighter organisation?

The future is genuinely open.

Can the JDU hold its ground without its defining leader? Write back and let us know what you think.

Until my next.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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Politics is no sport, and Indian politics, where sportsmanship is now a museum piece, was never going to take this sportingly.

Indian Youth Congress president Uday Bhanu Chib is discovering that the hard way, after a Delhi court sent him to four days of police custody following a shirtless protest by IYC workers at the India AI Impact Summit on February 20.

IYC workers entered Hall No. 5 at Bharat Mandapam, removed their T-shirts to reveal printed slogans, and held up messages accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being “compromised” over the India-US trade deal framework. The shirts also carried images of Modi and US President Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Modi later denounced the protest, alleging that the Congress had turned a global event into a platform for what he called “dirty and naked politics” (gandi aur nangi rajniti). “Congress leaders reached the venue naked in front of foreign guests,” he said. He then added, with characteristic relish: “I ask the Congress people, the country knows that you are already naked; then why did you feel the need to take off your clothes?”

Delhi Police arrested Chib and accused him of being the “mastermind” behind the protest. Police further alleged that the demonstration drew inspiration from Nepal’s recent Gen Z movement, which toppled the government there, and that it formed part of an “international conspiracy” to embarrass India before global leaders. When in doubt, add geopolitics.

After Chib’s arrest, Rahul Gandhi hit back with a “This is India, not North Korea” jibe. Drawing a parallel between the Modi government and Kim Jong-un’s regime, Gandhi said the world’s largest democracy was being pushed towards a place where dissent is labelled treason and asking questions is called conspiracy. “When those in power start seeing themselves as the nation and dissent as the enemy, that is when democracy dies,” he said. He also called the shirtless IYC protesters his “Babbar Sher” and praised their “peaceful protest.”

As Modi trained his fire on the Congress, the party retrieved an old photograph of former Haryana Minister Anil Vij, shirtless, at what appeared to be a BJP protest. Former IYC president Srinivas B.V. shared a clip of Vij’s protest on X on February 23 and wrote: “The nudes of yesterday, the BJPites of today.” He asked: “If stripping off a T-shirt to protest is called nudity, then what do you call this?”

The polarised politics of the moment will not let this high-voltage drama settle quickly. But the question it leaves behind is worth asking: is shirtless really shameless?

There are multiple examples of topless protests by women across the world, particularly in Europe. In India, the most resonant precedent remains July 15, 2004, when 12 Meira Paibis in Manipur stunned the country by stripping to the waist in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla Fort in Imphal.

Meira Paibi, literally “torchbearers,” are women’s groups from the majority Meitei community, also known as Imas, mothers of Manipur. Theirs was no spontaneous act. They held a banner that read “Indian Army Rape Us”. They were protesting the alleged gangrape, torture, and killing of Thangjam Manorama, a 32-year-old woman arrested by the 17th Assam Rifles and found dead hours later with gunshot wounds to her genitals. The protest jolted mainstream India out of its indifference to Manipur and drew global attention, not least because it inverted the language of shame and sent it back to the institution that had used it as a weapon.

Beyond India, such protests have appeared elsewhere: the Ukrainian feminist group Femen; the 2012 “Sextremists” march in Paris; and, more recently, on March 8, 2025, when thousands of women staged a topless protest in Paris against the global rise of fascism. The annual Go Topless Day demonstrations in several countries make a similar argument. The body as statement, not spectacle.

India carries a different set of codes. For women, such protests remain eruptions rather than routine. For men, the shirtless moment has mostly belonged to sport and cinema.

The most enduring shirtless image in Indian sport belongs to Sourav Ganguly. On July 13, 2002, after India’s two-wicket victory over England in the NatWest Trophy final at Lord’s—chasing 326 after collapsing to 146 for 5 before Mohammad Kaif and Yuvraj Singh rebuilt the innings—Ganguly removed his shirt on the Lord’s balcony and twirled it overhead.

It was widely read as a reply to Andrew Flintoff, who had done the same at the Wankhede Stadium months earlier after England levelled the ODI series 3-3. In the rush of that moment, Ganguly reportedly urged teammates to join him. Team manager Rajeev Shukla and a hesitant Rahul Dravid, with VVS Laxman also tugging at his shirt, stopped the contagion. Harbhajan Singh later said he was relieved. There could be only one “Salman Khan” (referring to the actor’s signature move in Bollywood).

That brings us to Hindi cinema, where the shirtless male body has its own lineage. Dharmendra is usually credited with turning it into a statement. Sanjay Dutt carried it forward. Salman Khan converted it into a brand identity, with audience hysteria almost scripted into the reveal.

Others followed: Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Ajay Devgn, and John Abraham. Then the next line: Varun Dhawan, Ranveer Singh, Ishaan Khatter, Ibrahim Ali Khan. The trend travelled south, with Allu Arjun, Mahesh Babu, Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, and Ram Charan joining the roll of cinematic torsos.

But politics is not cricket and certainly not cinema. Public opinion is not a stadium crowd. The arithmetic of a shirtless protest is rarely simple.

Within the opposition, reactions were mixed. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the Congress had chosen the wrong platform and should have avoided embarrassing the country before foreign delegates. BSP chief Mayawati disapproved of expressing political grievance through “semi-nudity” and warned against tarnishing India’s image. RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha was gentler but suggested the manner of protest could have been better.

Whether the stunt sharpened the Congress argument about the government’s record or merely handed the BJP a convenient distraction remains unclear. The Hindi-speaking heartland, where politics around the body carries a distinct charge, may judge it harshly or shrug, depending on which channel is on.

As the verdict swings between “Babbar Sher” and “nangi rajniti”, this newsletter leaves the larger question to you: how much of nudity, or semi-nudity, belongs in politics?

Somewhere in the background, a young generation hums a line from Gully Boy: Tu nanga hi to aaya hai, kya ghanta lekar jayega. “You came with nothing, and you’ll leave with nothing.”

Until the next political theatre,

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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When Mani Shankar Aiyar went on the offensive this week—attacking party colleagues by name, praising a Communist Chief Minister, and announcing that he was “a Gandhian, a Nehruvian, a Rajivian, but not a Rahulian”—the Congress reacted as if he were a distant relative at a wedding. General Secretary (Organisation) K.C. Venugopal told reporters that Aiyar’s remarks were made “in personal capacity” and that he “is not currently in the Congress party”.

Aiyar rejected the characterisation outright. “I am in the Congress party, I haven’t left it,” he said. “Mr Rahul Gandhi has forgotten that I am a member of the party.” Aiyar’s comment suggests a generation gap between himself and the current crop of Congress leaders.

Aiyar also described Venugopal as a “rowdy”, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor as an “unprincipled careerist”, and party spokesperson Pawan Khera as a “tattu”. The remarks came at a seminar in Thiruvananthapuram, where Aiyar had gone to speak on Panchayati Raj—a subject he pursued with genuine commitment as Union Minister. “There are Congress leaders whom I greatly admire,” he added. “Then there are others like K.C. Venugopal whom Rahul Gandhi admires.”

So Aiyar insisted, at the same time, on his Congress connection and his disenchantment with Rahul. A day later he justified his contrarian stand by invoking scripture. “The Congress lives because of dissidence, the Congress grows because there are many opinions, and it is all connected with the Vedic injunction that god is one, the Congress is one,” he said. Aiyar also explained that his “not a Rahulian” remark was made on generational grounds. “How can one expect me to be a “Rahulian” when the boy is about 30 years younger than me and I haven’t had an opportunity to work with him?” Rahul, he added, has refused to meet him. He also insisted that if the Congress couldn’t handle a dissident, it would be the party’s doom.

Union Minister Ramdas Athawale seized the opening, saying he would be “very happy” if Aiyar joined the National Democratic Alliance. But Aiyar joining either the NDA or the Left is not a serious possibility.

I have met Aiyar a number of times when he was Union Cabinet Minister for Panchayati Raj, Youth Affairs and Sports, and Development of North Eastern Region. Foreign delegations made regular tours of his office at Krishi Bhavan in New Delhi. I have not seen a more flamboyant Minister in the Panchayati Raj chair after that. I have also been at the receiving end of his fury a number of times while asking him questions—because he always believed that reporters had a habit of getting him into controversies. He was well aware of his value as a media byte.

This was before Aiyar and controversies became a regular affair, almost a new normal. The “chaiwala” taunt directed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of the 2014 general election, the “neech kisam ka aadmi” remark in 2017 that earned him a formal suspension from the Congress (later revoked), and the comparison of Rahul Gandhi’s elevation as Congress president to Aurangzeb’s ascension to the Mughal throne. “Did elections ever happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shah Jahan came. Was any election held? After Shah Jahan it was understood Aurangzeb would be the leader,” Aiyar had said then.

On both the “chaiwala” and “neech” occasions, the BJP capitalised on Aiyar’s remarks. Whether such remarks are a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, or there is something more to it, only Aiyar knows.

His latest “Rajivian, not Rahulian” remarks remind me of the generational question with which the Congress has grappled from time to time—with things always settled, eventually, in favour of the younger generation. Team Rahul, though, has struggled to gather strength. The talk about leaders of the Rajiv generation giving way to a Rahul generation has been going on for at least 15 years now.

I recall that in December 2009, at the Burari conclave of the Congress—which I was attending as a newly minted Congress reporter in Delhi—party general secretary Digvijaya Singh, considered in those times a guide to Rahul, said it was time to make way for Rahul Gandhi’s Congress. He recalled how Rajiv Gandhi had made him and Ahmed Patel—then Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary and the most powerful figures in the party after the Gandhis—State Congress presidents when they were 36-37 years old. Singh also recalled how Rajiv Gandhi had built his team by inducting Ghulam Nabi Azad, Oscar Fernandes, and Ashok Gehlot, and said it was now time for Rahul Gandhi to do the same. Singh’s remarks riled many of the older generation leaders who wanted to continue in key positions.

In September 2014, the battle between Young Turks and the old guard played out fully in the All India Congress Committee (AICC), when 12 AICC secretaries close to Rahul Gandhi submitted a letter to the then AICC general secretary Janardan Dwivedi. The letter said that they had been observing “very strongly of late, there come statements from different rungs of senior Congressmen which are not in the interest of the party. If there is any concern, it should be expressed in a very dignified manner and at an appropriate place within the party forum.”

This was after Digvijaya Singh had argued that Rahul Gandhi’s silence on critical issues had contributed to the party’s loss in the war of perception, and after Dwivedi’s public remark that politicians past a certain age should quit “active” politics. After the letter war, Digvijaya Singh said: “I support the demand of the secretaries of AICC. Generational change must happen.” He noted, with evident satisfaction, that he had been saying so since Burari in December 2009.

One of those 12 secretaries was Bhupen Borah from Assam, who resigned this week from the Congress after 32 years and is to join the BJP on February 22. He served as Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president from 2021 to 2025, before being replaced by Gaurav Gogoi. He alleged he was then sidelined even within the coalition committee he was assigned to lead. That apart, none of the young leaders who signed that 2014 letter has done anything decisive for the Congress in their respective States.

Old-timers recall how the tussle between the Young Turks—Chandra Shekhar, Mohan Dharia—and the old guard—Morarji Desai, K. Kamaraj—led to the 1969 split and the subsequent strengthening of Indira Gandhi. Again, a group of 23 leaders wrote to Sonia Gandhi in August 2020, calling for sweeping reforms: decentralisation of power, empowerment of State units, elections to the Congress organisation at all levels from the block to the Congress Working Committee, and the urgent constitution of a central parliamentary board. When spokesperson Sanjay Jha said the leaders had urged a change in political leadership, many signatories quickly denied it. Later, one of these G-23 leaders, Shashi Tharoor, contested Mallikarjun Kharge for the party president’s post but lost. Kharge had the tacit backing of the Gandhis.

The old guard versus new generation dynamic has played out in Congress units in Assam (Himanta Biswa Sarma versus Tarun Gogoi), Madhya Pradesh (Jyotiraditya Scindia versus the Digvijaya Singh–Kamal Nath axis), Rajasthan (Sachin Pilot versus Ashok Gehlot), and Haryana (Ashok Tanwar versus Bhupinder Singh Hooda). The Congress lost Assam and Madhya Pradesh as Sarma and Scindia crossed over to the BJP, taking the State governments with them.

It is now taking place in regional parties too: in the Trinamool Congress (TMC) it is Abhishek Banerjee—Mamata Banerjee’s nephew—versus the party’s founding elders, and in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), old-timers are uneasy with Akash Anand, Mayawati’s nephew.

“Team Rahul” is yet to be consolidated, as much as the scenario of a new TMC leader in West Bengal or a new BSP leader in Uttar Pradesh remains unclear. The old guard in all these parties feels sidelined and who come ahead eventually is anybody’s guess.

I will be back next week, assuming that no one has disowned anyone by then.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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Dear Readers,

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla is in the eye of a storm once again, with the Congress and some other opposition parties pressing a notice for his removal from office. Although the government has the numbers to defeat the motion, Birla, taking a moral high ground, decided he would not attend the proceedings of the Lok Sabha until a decision was taken on the no-confidence motion. The notice, signed by at least 118 MPs seeking Birla’s removal, accuses him of acting in a “blatantly partisan” manner in the Lok Sabha.

This is a long-simmering friction between the Speaker and the opposition reaching a flashpoint. Birla has been accused earlier too, with opposition members frequently criticising him for what they call his “aggressive” posture during their protests in the House and for his alleged partiality to the BJP.

This time, the opposition’s anger centres on Birla not allowing Rahul Gandhi to speak in the Lok Sabha about a book written by Gen. M. M. Naravane. When Gandhi was suspended, the Opposition accused Birla of openly espousing the ruling party’s version on all controversial matters.

The bad blood between opposition members and Birla in this Winter Session has worsened after Birla suspended eight Lok Sabha members last week, claiming he had “credible information that several members from the Congress would create an unprecedented incident after reaching the Honourable Prime Minister’s seat”. The Congress denied there was any such plan by its women MPs to carry out an “unpleasant act” or physical threat near the Prime Minister’s seat. Birla went on to cite the same reason for Prime Minister Modi’s unprecedented absence from the House to read his response to the Motion of Thanks.

In August 2019, Birla had made some lofty comments in an interview with me (for a different publication). “House is not run by the majority; House runs through consensus. The task assigned to me expects me to be impartial and transparent. One should not only be impartial but also appear to be impartial. When opposition vouches for you being impartial, it matters. I have always made efforts that the opposition—though they are less in number—get adequate opportunity and time to have their say.”

But as things stand now, the opposition is clearly not buying the pep talk.

Birla, however, is not the lone Speaker to have faced the opposition’s wrath. The former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan also faced frequent angry barbs. The most intense protest against her came when she suspended 25 Congress MPs in August 2015 for five days after persistent disruptions by them. She had then accused them of “wilful disobedience” in the House, but the Congress termed the move a “black day” in the history of India’s parliamentary democracy. A year earlier, she was under attack from the Congress for denying Leader of Opposition status to Rahul Gandhi stating that the party had not won 10 per cent of the total seats (55 of 543 seats in Lok Sabha).

While opposition members accused her of being “harsh”, she said in an interview that she had to face frequent “halla-gulla” (uproar) from the opposition during her time in the chair.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee invoked the ire of his own party, the CPI(M), in July 2008 when he refused to resign as Speaker after the party withdrew support to the Manmohan Singh government over the Indo-US nuclear deal. Chatterjee was later expelled from the party. Ironically, Chatterjee faced frequent criticism by the BJP (which was then the main opposition party), which often criticised him for alleged partisan behaviour during the 2004-09 United Progressive Alliance-I (UPA) tenure. At that time, Chatterjee held the BJP responsible for creating major disruptions in the Lok Sabha.

The Rajya Sabha Chair has also faced frequent challenges, irrespective of the dispensation in power.

In December 2024, when the opposition parties decided to table a no-confidence motion against Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge said that “the biggest disruptor of the Rajya Sabha is the Chairperson”. Opposition members, including those from the Congress, repeatedly accused Dhankhar of echoing the arguments of the ruling party alone. In March 2023, Congress said the “Chairman can’t be cheerleader”. This was after Dhankhar criticised Rahul Gandhi for his comments regarding microphones being turned off in Parliament.

“There are certain offices which require us to shed our prejudices, party allegiances, and compel us to rid ourselves of whatever propaganda we may have imbibed along the way. The office of the Vice President of India, an office on which the Constitution bestows the additional responsibility of being the Chair of the Rajya Sabha, is foremost amongst these. The Chairman is an umpire, a referee, a friend, philosopher, and guide to all. He cannot be a cheerleader for any ruling dispensation,” party general secretary Jairam Ramesh had said at that time.

Back in August 2013, agitated by repeated disruptions, the then Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari spoke harsh words, wondering if the Members wished the House to become a “federation of anarchists”. The remark drew a sharp reaction from the BJP, then the main opposition party, which asked for it to be expunged.

Ansari made the remark when BJP Members started to shout slogans on the land issue related to Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and did not let the Question Hour take place. Earlier, in December 2012, when Question Hour in the Rajya Sabha was halfway through, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati walked to the well, telling Ansari it was his responsibility to ensure smooth functioning of the House during Zero Hour, but he was always absent after noon. Ansari looked visibly stunned at the bouncer aimed at the Chair itself.

When Ansari abruptly adjourned the House sine die when the Lokpal Bill debate was on in 2011, Kiran Bedi said Ansari had “lost a historical moment” and should have “risen above politics” for the passage of the bill.

The history of no-confidence motions against Speakers is heavily loaded in their favour, with the motions against G.V. Mavalankar in 1954 and Balram Jakhar in 1987 defeated. In 1966, a motion against the then Speaker Hukam Singh was not admitted as it lacked the requisite number of backers.

Clarity on the no-confidence notice against Om Birla will only emerge on March 9 when the House reconvenes after it was recessed on February 13. There has to be at least a 14-day gap between giving the notice and taking up the motion in the House.

The spar between the Chair and the opposition has become a frequent phenomenon in Parliament. Who is to be blamed? The ruling party, which has in the past hailed parliamentary disruptions as a form of democratic protest and indulged in them extensively. Or the Chairperson, who has often been found keen to protect the interests of the ruling dispensation?

Or the gradual erosion of democracy that India is seeing, where, on one side, decorous debate has become impossible, and on the other, even the prestige of a hoary position cannot make office-bearers cast aside their private political leanings.

Until my next newsletter.

Anand Mishra

Political Editor, Frontline

The Indian National Congress has once again managed to wander into a familiar argument over Sikh sentiments, just as the Punjab Assembly election of February 2027 inches into view.

This time, the spark is a public spat between Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and Union Minister Ravneet Singh Bittu, a three-time MP who crossed over from the Congress to the BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election. What started as verbal jousting between former colleagues quickly swelled into allegations of religious insult, with the BJP wasting no time in recasting the exchange as an attack not on a political defector, but on the Sikh community itself.

The confrontation unfolded near the Makar Dwar of Parliament on February 4, where suspended Congress MPs—mostly from Punjab—were staging a protest. As Bittu, now Union Minister of State for Railways, walked past, Rahul Gandhi remarked, “The thing is, here is a traitor walking right by.”

What initially looked like banter between former colleagues escalated fast. Gandhi extended a handshake, adding, “Hello, brother. My traitor friend. Don’t worry, you will come back.”

Bittu was not amused. Rejecting the handshake, he later alleged that Gandhi appeared “intoxicated” and “not in his senses”, claiming the Congress leader tried to manhandle him before being restrained by K.C. Venugopal. “He thinks he is the king of the country… I told him I will never shake hands with a traitor. I have my Guru’s turban on my head. I am from Punjab. How can I bow before you?”

Bittu went further, branding Gandhi “desh ke dushman” (enemy of the nation) and invoking 1984. “There is no city left where Sikhs were not killed,” he said, accusing Gandhi of harbouring animosity towards Punjabis.

The BJP moved fast. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking in the Rajya Sabha, seized on the remark, conveniently reframing the “traitor” jibe not as a comment on political defection but as an assault on Sikh identity, and creating a furore.

This has been particularly useful for the BJP because it wants to deflect attention from several facts. One, the fact that Prime Minister Modi was not present in the Lok Sabha to reply to the debate on the Motion of Thanks. Two, the party’s Sikh Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, features often in the Epstein files. And three, some uncomfortable facts are being revealed by General M.M. Naravane’s unpublished book.

Modi, thus, went to town, describing Gandhi as a yuvraj (prince) with a shaatir dimaag (crooked mind). He argued that singling out Bittu was an expression of the “hatred for Sikhs that is filled in the Congress”, and shifted the frame of the Rahul-Bittu spat from political loyalty to religious identity.

Bittu’s family history adds heft to the BJP’s argument. His grandfather Beant Singh, who was Punjab’s Chief Minister from 1992 to 1995, was killed in a suicide bombing at the Punjab and Haryana Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh on August 31, 1995. The attack, carried out by Dilawar Singh Babbar of the pro-Khalistan outfit Babbar Khalsa International, claimed 17 lives. Beant Singh took office at the height of militancy in Punjab and is credited with restoring order through an aggressive crackdown on Khalistani separatists, although his methods remain controversial. The assassination scarred Punjab’s political consciousness.

For decades, the Congress has struggled to shake off the “anti-Sikh” label, a burden dating back to Operation Blue Star in June 1984 and the anti-Sikh riots that followed. It has made repeated attempts at reconciliation, including appointing Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister in 2004, but the party is often undone by its own people. During the 2019 Lok Sabha campaign, Sam Pitroda responded to questions about the 1984 riots with a blunt “Hua toh hua” (what happened, happened), undoing years of damage control.

Meanwhile, Gandhi’s comment to Bittu—“You will come back”—is interesting. He was likely referring to Ashok Tanwar, who returned to the party in October 2024, five years after joining the BJP. Tanwar, however, was an exception. The list of Rahul Gandhi’s high-profile former associates who have exited the Congress includes Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, R.P.N. Singh, and Milind Deora. In fact, Scindia’s defection in 2020 brought down the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh.

Tanwar’s own journey indicates his unusual case. After quitting the Congress in 2019 following differences with former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, he spent five years drifting across parties—Jannayak Janta Party, Trinamool Congress, Aam Aadmi Party, and finally the BJP—before rejoining the Congress just hours before polling ended in the Haryana Assembly election of October 2024, with a dramatic entry at a Rahul Gandhi rally in Mahendragarh.

Punjab’s political landscape has changed sharply since the Congress last held power. The 2022 Assembly election saw the Aam Aadmi Party sweep 92 of 117 seats, flattening both the Congress and the traditional Shiromani Akali Dal–BJP alliance. The Congress was reduced to 18 seats, just five months after the party forced out Captain Amarinder Singh as Chief Minister following a bruising power struggle with State Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu.

Amarinder Singh, who served as Punjab Chief Minister from 2017 to 2021, is another high-profile exit from the Congress. After he quit the party in September 2021, citing repeated humiliation by the leadership, he went on to form the Punjab Lok Congress. He contested the 2022 election in alliance with the BJP, but his party failed to win a single seat and the former Chief Minister lost even his stronghold of Patiala Urban by nearly 20,000 votes.

As things stand today, the Congress faces a challenging situation in Punjab and controversies about being anti-Sikh could hurt it politically, although the BJP’s opportunistic framing is also being seen as rather ham-handed.

As the two parties continue to trade insults, write and tell us what you make of this controversy about yaars (friend) and gaddars.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Reader,

The sudden death of Ajit Pawar in a plane crash on January 28 has sent shockwaves through the Nationalist Congress Party faction he led. By several accounts, that faction was close to reuniting with the parent party headed by his uncle, Sharad Pawar.

The 66-year-old Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra was travelling from Mumbai to Baramati when his Learjet 45 crashed while attempting to land at the tabletop airstrip in his home constituency. Five people were killed, including both pilots.

Ajit Pawar’s faction was still finding its footing. It took shape in July 2023, when he led a group of senior leaders, including Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare, out of the NCP, arguing that his 85-year-old uncle should step aside for younger leadership. Ajit joined the Mahayuti alliance and became Deputy Chief Minister for the sixth time. In February 2024, the Election Commission of India awarded his faction the party name and the “clock” symbol.

Family rifts in Indian politics, though, rarely last. According to Kiran Gujar, a close associate of Ajit Pawar for over four decades, the late leader had told him just five days before the crash that a merger with the Sharad Pawar faction was near. The two sides had already fought the January 15 civic elections in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad together and planned to carry that alliance into the zilla parishad elections next month.

With Ajit gone, the question of succession now hangs over the party. The contest may narrow to Supriya Sule, Sharad Pawar’s daughter, and Sunetra Pawar, Ajit’s widow. Both factions have senior leaders, but the Pawars’ own history suggests leadership will stay within the family. Only the elder Pawar, frail but still politically sharp, can hold the camps together—if a merger happens at all.

This is not the first time a sudden accident has ended a political career and unsettled a party or a State. Indian political history is dotted with such moments, each followed by succession battles and shifts in power.

The death of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy in September 2009 remains etched in Andhra Pradesh’s memory. At the height of his power, after leading the Congress to victories in 2004 and 2009, YSR was killed when his helicopter crashed in the Nallamala Hills during bad weather. He was 60. The Congress high command chose K. Rosaiah as Chief Minister, and later N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, instead of his son Jagan Mohan Reddy. Jagan broke away, formed the YSR Congress Party, and over time wiped out the Congress in the State, much as Mamata Banerjee had done in West Bengal. Andhra Pradesh politics now swings between regional forces, with the Congress marginalised and the BJP rising from the edges.

A similar rupture followed the death of Madhavrao Scindia in a plane crash in September 2001 while flying to a rally in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress lost power in Madhya Pradesh in 2003 and stayed out for 15 years. When it returned in 2018 under Kamal Nath, the spell was short. In 2020, Madhavrao’s son Jyotiraditya Scindia defected to the BJP, bringing down the government.

Former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani died in the Air India Flight 171 crash in June 2025, when a Boeing 787 Dreamliner bound for London went down seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. The crash also killed medical students in the hostel the aircraft struck, and raised serious questions about aviation safety. Politically, though, Rupani’s death caused little churn. There was no succession fight, no dynasty pressing a claim within the BJP’s Gujarat unit.

Road accidents have claimed their share of political lives as well. Rajesh Pilot, the Congress leader from Rajasthan and a former Union Minister, died in June 2000 when his jeep collided with a State transport bus on his way to Jaipur airport. He was 55 and preparing to challenge Sonia Gandhi for the party presidency. His son Sachin Pilot later inherited his political legacy, but the loss left a gap the party struggled to fill. Gopinath Munde, the BJP leader from Maharashtra, died in June 2014 when a speeding taxi hit his car in New Delhi, just eight days after he took oath as Union Rural Development Minister. He was 64. Sahib Singh Verma, former Delhi Chief Minister, died in a road accident in Rajasthan in June 2007.

The most consequential air crash in Indian political history remains that of Sanjay Gandhi in June 1980. Indira Gandhi’s younger son, who had emerged as the real power centre during the Emergency, died while performing aerial stunts in a Pitts S-2A aircraft near Safdarjung airport. He was 33. The official inquiry blamed poor weather and pilot error.

The Congress never recovered its old shape. Sanjay was widely seen as his mother’s heir. His death pushed Rajiv Gandhi, a reluctant entrant with no taste for politics, into public life. After Rajiv’s assassination in May 1991, power passed to Sonia Gandhi and now, for all practical purposes, to Rahul Gandhi. Sanjay’s widow Maneka and their son Varun sought a political future in the BJP.

The list is long. Dorjee Khandu, Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, died in a helicopter crash near Tawang in April 2011. O.P. Jindal, Haryana’s Power Minister, and Surender Singh, the State’s Agriculture Minister, were killed in a helicopter crash near Saharanpur in March 2005. G.M.C. Balayogi, the Lok Sabha Speaker, died in a helicopter crash in Andhra Pradesh’s Krishna district in March 2002.

Each such death invites conspiracy theories, whether Sanjay Gandhi’s, Madhavrao Scindia’s, or Rajesh Pilot’s. They have surfaced now after Ajit Pawar’s.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has called for a Supreme Court-monitored probe, alleging that “all other agencies” are “completely compromised”. Sharad Pawar, however, moved quickly to dampen speculation. “Some incidents have no politics behind them,” he said in Baramati. “There’s no conspiracy involved; it’s purely an accident.” The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is now investigating the crash.

Online, the exchanges turned bitter. One user cited the deaths of Rupani and Ajit Pawar to attack the ruling party. Another fired back with the Congress’s own list—Sanjay Gandhi, Madhavrao Scindia, YSR, Dorjee Khandu, Rajesh Pilot. “Don’t be political vultures,” the response read. “Debate policies, not coffins.”

Politicians are in the public eye in death as much as in life. Whether by road or by air, a sudden end sends ripples through the system, rejigging loyalties and reopening questions of power. Ajit Pawar had rebelled against his uncle, saying Sharad Pawar was too old to lead. Now, the NCP might again veer towards the elder Pawar, not by choice but by circumstance. Politics has a way of delivering such ironies.

Write and tell us what you make of this turn of events.

Until the next newsletter,

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Readers,

Generational shifts in politics are neither new nor unusual. So when the BJP last week handed the baton of the party presidentship to Nitin Nabin, questions naturally arose about how much influence Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would continue to wield over the man and the party organisation going forward.

At 45, Nabin became the youngest leader to take charge of the BJP, currently the country’s largest national political party. When he was declared national working president in December 2025—a clear precursor to his elevation as party president a month later—the BJP was also in its 45th year. The party was formed in 1980, though its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, dates back to 1951.

A five-term MLA, Nabin entered active politics in 2006 after the death of his father, Nabin Kishore Prasad Sinha, a four-term MLA and senior BJP leader in Bihar who never quite cracked the top tier. Nabin belongs to the Kayastha community, numerically insignificant in Bihar’s caste arithmetic but long a dependable BJP support base.

Modi, acutely aware of the chatter about who really calls the shots, chose to address the issue from the podium itself. “When it comes to party matters, Mananiya [honourable] Nitin Nabin ji… I am a worker, and you are my boss,” he declared. He did not stop there: “Now, honourable Nitin Nabin ji is the President of all of us, and his responsibility is not just to manage the BJP but also to ensure coordination among all NDA allies.”

The BJP has previously had heavyweight figures as party presidents: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kushabhau Thakre, Rajnath Singh, M. Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari, and Amit Shah. Even J.P. Nadda from Himachal Pradesh, Nabin’s predecessor, Bangaru Laxman from Telangana, and Jana Krishnamurthi from Tamil Nadu were senior leaders. That a relatively lesser-known figure—never Deputy Chief Minister, State president, or Assembly leader—was handed the top party post, leapfrogging several willing seniors, was hard to miss.

In a television interview, Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury noted that Nabin was “anointed by the RSS” rather than elected through a democratic process, underlining what she described as a lack of internal freedom within the BJP. Others, meanwhile, credit the party for executing a generational shift and dismiss the idea that Nabin is “little known”, arguing that visibility is often a function of timing, not talent.

What is the BJP attempting by catapulting a State leader—never elevated to Deputy Chief Minister or State unit president—to the top party post at the Centre? Is this the start of a broader generational churn across the party and, eventually, the Central government?

The BJP has already sidelined seniors from Chief Ministerships, bringing in new faces in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, replacing stalwarts Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje, and Raman Singh. The message has been consistent, if not always comforting.

Is this a new BJP in the making, or merely a sharper consolidation of the Modi–Shah grip over the organisation—especially since the appointment follows nearly a year of intense speculation about a “MoSha” versus RSS tussle?

There are no easy answers. But many recall the similar unease among party seniors when Modi was elevated to chairman of the party’s Central Election Campaign Committee in March 2013, effectively declaring him the BJP’s prime ministerial face for the 2014 Lok Sabha election. L.K. Advani was soon eased out of prominence after the Modi government took office. The Margdarshak Mandal, created in August 2014, appeared designed to keep Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi away from active roles, even if Modi, Rajnath Singh, and the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee were also nominally included.

Days before Nabin’s formal elevation, the known Modi detractor Subramanian Swamy suggested that the RSS and BJP should now send Modi himself to the Margdarshak Mandal—a comment that travelled faster than its chances of being acted upon.

Another argument in circulation is that when the BJP first came to power in 1998, Kushabhau Thakre—hardly a household name in Delhi—was party president. That historical parallel, however, may offer only limited comfort to Nabin, at least in the first couple of years.

Nabin takes charge at a tricky moment. The BJP faces elections in States that are not its strongholds: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, where Mamata Banerjee remains a formidable presence. Even in Uttar Pradesh, winning the State for a third consecutive term in 2027 looks tougher after the party’s poor showing in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, which revealed the traction of the Samajwadi Party’s Pichchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak (PDA) pitch.

That the BJP has executed a generational shift—first in the States and now at the very top of the organisation—is remarkable in itself. There are two ways to read this. One is that Modi and Shah maintain a steel grip on the party, and dissent has learned the virtue of silence. The other is a deeper organisational lesson: however senior a leader may be, life outside the BJP offers little political oxygen.

Consider Kalyan Singh, who quit the BJP twice—in 1999 and 2009—only to find his influence sharply diminished, despite once being the party’s tallest leader in Uttar Pradesh. Or Uma Bharti, expelled in 2005 for indiscipline, who formed a separate party that fizzled out before she returned to the BJP in 2011.

The Congress has its own cautionary tales. Both Pranab Mukherjee, who quit in 1986 to form the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress, and P. Chidambaram, who left in 1996 to join the Tamil Maanila Congress and later floated his own outfit, eventually returned after their experiments fell flat. There are exceptions—Mamata Banerjee and Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy quit the Congress, dismantled it in their States, and emerged as independent forces—but they are rare enough to be cited precisely because they are rare.

The Congress points to Shashi Tharoor contesting against Mallikarjun Kharge for the party president’s post in 2022, and Jitendra Prasada versus Sonia Gandhi in 2000, as evidence of internal democracy. In both cases, however, the outcome was never really in doubt. Prasada’s son, Jitin Prasada, is now in the BJP, while Tharoor’s periodic expressions of discontent with the Congress leadership continue to make headlines.

Regardless of the party, how much of it is genuine democratic exercise, and how much is a carefully managed ritual dressed up as generational change—that is the question to mull.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Reader,

“There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.” This remark, credited to the late American Congressman William Lacy Clay Sr.—who made it the motto of the Congressional Black Caucus he co-founded in 1971—resonates uncannily in Indian politics every now and then.

The latest instance to catch my attention was Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar’s cryptic response to newspapers on January 14, amid growing speculation of a rapprochement between the NCP faction he leads and the one led by his uncle Sharad Pawar.

“There has been no discussion with Pawar saheb at all,” he told reporters, before adding, almost as an afterthought: “I want to make it clear that there are no permanent enemies in politics.” The tell-tale signs of warming relations between the chacha-bhatija parties have already been visible. For the Pune Municipal Corporation and Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation elections, the two factions decided to contest together. Not allying with the BJP, which is Ajit Pawar’s State-level partner, was read by many as a strategic withdrawal, or at least tactical patience.

On January 10, Ajit Pawar and Supriya Sule shared a political platform in Pune for the first time since the bitter split of July 2023. The bitterness had only intensified since then, but political survival, as always, exerts its own gravitational pull. Leaving observers to draw their own conclusions, Ajit Pawar added that he believes in the politics of “addition”, not subtraction—a nice slogan that does a lot of heavy lifting.

Some time ago, we saw the dramatic coming together of Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray. When a news anchor sought to link Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to this development, the senior BJP leader showed no hesitation in claiming credit, but ironically, the two brothers joined hands to take on the BJP-led Mahayuti in the Mumbai corporation election.

Is the rajniti ka ganit changing in Maharashtra? Or is this simply a case of estranged cousins reconciling, in both the Pawar and Thackeray families?

But why should such “Hello, Brother” moments baffle anyone, despite the different political trajectories? Blood, as they say, is thicker than water—and often thicker than ideology.

If politics can make strange bedfellows, why should family members who turned strangers for a while—in the Pawars’ case, two and a half years—not come together again? Especially when it serves both sides.

Far from Maharashtra, in Bihar, a friendly festival unfolded on January 14, the day of Makar Sankranti. Months after a fierce rupture, the estranged family of Lalu Prasad Yadav got together to celebrate in unison. Tej Pratap Yadav milked the feast for all it was worth, inviting leaders from across the political spectrum.

As if to forestall any possibility of Tej Pratap drifting towards the BJP, Lalu Prasad was prominently present at the event. Also in attendance was Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Kumar Sinha from the BJP, amid speculation that the saffron party might nominate Tej Pratap as an MLC. Ministers from the Bihar government (Ram Kripal Yadav from the BJP and Ashok Choudhary from the Janata Dal (United)) turned up too, as did Governor Arif Mohammed Khan.

Lalu, father of Tej Pratap, was the only prominent opposition leader at the gathering. To be fair, Tej Pratap had also invited his younger brother Tejashwi Yadav, the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly. But Tejashwi stayed away, possibly to avoid any embarrassment should his elder brother make a disruptive move.

Despite the fallout and despite his cryptic responses when asked about joining the NDA, Tej Pratap has been assiduously projecting his bonhomie with father Lalu—this, even though it was Lalu who expelled him for six years from the party in May 2025, citing “irresponsible behaviour not in accordance with the family’s values and traditions”.

Similarly, Ajit Pawar—despite being in the NDA and having split the NCP—keeps showering encomiums on his uncle Sharad Pawar, who remains a pillar of the opposition in Maharashtra.

The veterans, it appears, are too influential to be ignored. Both Ajit Pawar and Tej Pratap, who fancy themselves as beneficiaries of their legacy, know this all too well. Even Raj Thackeray, despite his sharp differences with Uddhav in the past, never uttered a word against uncle Bal Thackeray, invoking the late patriarch’s ideology at every turn.

But political legacy is a double-edged sword. Sons often carry the burden of their fathers and forefathers. Tejashwi Yadav in Bihar and Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh have both had occasions to keep themselves at arm’s length from the legacies of Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav respectively. For Tejashwi, this was more pronounced, a bid to escape the charge of “jungle raj” associated with Lalu. In Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav could forge an alliance with Mayawati in 2019 only because he made a different kind of outreach to her, markedly different from the bitter relationship his father shared with her.

I recall how often the former Union Minister of State for Finance in the NDA, Jayant Sinha, had to face awkward questions due to his father Yashwant Sinha’s strident anti-BJP stance. He often found himself uncomfortable in the Modi government, since Sinha Sr. kept up his attacks on the BJP.

In a similar way, Varun Gandhi fell victim to his mother’s falling out with the Sonia Gandhi family and lost out on building himself a position in the Congress. Later, he used the discord to join the BJP, but had to remain largely an outsider there too.

If we see this playing out on the large canvas, Rahul Gandhi has had to bear the brunt of being a scion of the Gandhi family, accused of all the wrongdoings attributed to the Congress of the past. Will Priyanka, who is taking on a larger role in the party these days, face the same spleen, or will her Vadra surname come in handy? We will find out soon.

It seems as if legacy can be both liability and asset. What do you think? Write and let us know.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

There are many ways to tell an election is near. The Model Code of Conduct is not one of them. The real signal is government-issued drama: a raid at dawn, a crowd by noon, and the word “vendetta” doing heavy duty by evening. In Indian politics, nothing announces polling season quite like an investigating agency suddenly discovering urgency, relevance, and impeccable timing.

“Mr Prime Minister, control your Home Minister”—this line from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was all over social media after her much-publicised standoff with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) during its raids on political consultancy firm I-PAC chief Pratik Jain’s residence in Kolkata.

A day after the standoff with the ED, “political vendetta” is again in the air, in effect announcing the beginning of the West Bengal election campaign much before it officially kicks off for the Assembly election scheduled in March-April this year. Banerjee, referring to Jain as the person in charge of her party, the Trinamool Congress’ IT cell, alleged that the Central government tried to steal strategy and data of the Trinamool Congress and led a massive protest rally on Friday.

Political temperature rose after the Thursday raid at Jain’s residence. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav alleged that the ED raid at the I-PAC office in Kolkata is a pressure tactic ahead of the Assembly election in West Bengal. Some news outlets wondered if it was a pre-election crackdown on political activists. Others on social media questioned why Banerjee was breathing fire after the raids unless her government had something to hide.

Banerjee herself used strong words like “the nasty and the naughty” for the Home Minister. Some on social media were unsparing about her, alleging “kuchh to kaand kiya hai” [some scam must have been done].

In classic pre-election sparring, the parties concerned took their stated positions—Banerjee saying that the ED raids were part of political vendetta and the BJP objecting to the Chief Minister storming into the Jain residence and taking away “key evidence”.

Banerjee maintained that this was not law enforcement. “Is this how the nasty and naughty Home Minister functions, who cannot protect the country and is sending agencies to harass before elections?” she said, adding, “I am sorry, Mr Prime Minister, please control your Home Minister.” She also asked, “What will be the result if I raid the BJP office?” Another Trinamool worker on X posted a picture of a lotus face with the tagline “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus”, while a BJP supporter saw it as “blatant obstruction of justice by Banerjee”.

Not so long ago, when Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren was arrested on January 31, 2024, in a case of alleged land grab, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) called it a “political vendetta” and consolidated different tribal groups behind it. The INDIA bloc pulled off a five-zero victory in all tribal-reserved Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand. Not only this, but by milking the issue even after his bail, the JMM managed a second successive victory in the State election the same year. Even ally Congress thought it pragmatic to depend on this theme. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi told his audiences that “the BJP had jailed a tribal Chief Minister” and that “the husband of Kalpana Soren had been sent to jail”, while reminding people about other incidents of atrocities on tribal people in BJP-ruled States.

But the strategy does not work everywhere. The AAP failed to capitalise on the political vendetta theme in the 2025 Delhi Assembly election after being in power for 10 years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s letter to Delhi residents urging them to give one chance to the BJP had a bigger impact, and the party came to power after 27 years. Since March 2024, when Arvind Kejriwal was sent to jail—becoming the first sitting Chief Minister in Indian history to be imprisoned—the AAP centred its campaign around political vendetta.

Even when Kejriwal was bailed out in September, the AAP continued with the emotive issue. The party further scaled up its political vendetta campaign in October 2024 when the ED raided the AAP’s Rajya Sabha member Sanjeev Arora. The party called it “a politically motivated agenda aimed at dismantling the AAP”.

But this could not prevent the party’s ignominious defeat with a substantial vote percentage decline in February 2025. Kejriwal himself lost, as did four of his key party leaders.

The AAP got a taste of its own medicine in Punjab when the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) last July accused the ruling AAP government of resorting to political vendetta. Senior SAD leader Daljit Singh Cheema said, “Emergency-like conditions were being created in Punjab by the AAP team from Delhi, which was bent on suppressing the voice of the opposition.” Another SAD leader said, “The people of Punjab are witnessing state-sponsored goondaism. Voices raised against the government are being crushed.”

One is reminded of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the tota (parrot) comment of 2013.

Taking strong objection to the government’s interference in the CBI investigation into the coal block allocation scam case in 2013, the Supreme Court had castigated both the government and the agency, remarking that the CBI was a “caged parrot” with multiple masters.

The remark has since been extended beyond the CBI in public perception and political discourse, with the ED facing even more flak for becoming its master’s voice (the dispensation at the Centre, irrespective of party). In April 2018, the AAP, in a Facebook post, cautioned against calling “only CBI the government parrot (sarkari tota)” and named various agencies and constitutional posts which it said had come in the same category.

In Tamil Nadu, the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has repeatedly accused the Centre of misusing agencies like the ED for “vendetta politics” when raids were conducted against its Ministers. Actor turned politician Vijay, founder of the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam party, accused the ruling DMK government of political vendetta after a stampede at his September 2025 rally in Karur resulted in 41 deaths.

Well, 2026 is election year in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, and Assam. We can expect more instances of “political vendetta”, as all three States are ruled by non-NDA parties.

What raid do you expect next? Write in and tell us.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Readers,

At least 10 people have died after drinking tap water in Indore, India’s cleanest city for eight consecutive years. Eight years of gleaming trophies, ministerial photo-ops, and Swachh Survekshan garlands. The residents of Bhagirathpura locality got something else from their taps: sewage.

The name Bhagirathpura deserves a moment. In Hindu mythology, King Bhagirath brought the Ganges to earth by pleading with Siva to catch her immense force in his matted hair and channel her gently downward. Siva, seated in his abode Kailash, obliged. In Indore, the names Bhagirath and Kailash have resurfaced—though not quite in the manner the scriptures intended.

As the incident sparked political fury, the controversy found its Kailash: Madhya Pradesh Urban Administration Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya, a senior BJP leader and the local MLA for Indore-1 constituency. When NDTV journalist Anurag Dwary asked why accountability was being discussed only for junior officials and why proper drinking water arrangements had not been made, the Minister offered a masterclass in public relations.

He snapped, “Chodo yaar, tum fokat prashna mat puchcho” (Leave it, don’t ask useless questions). When Dwary persisted, saying he had visited the spot, Vijayvargiya lost his composure: “Kya ghanta pata hai tumhe” (Polite translation: What rubbish do you know?) The reporter challenged the Minister’s use of the slang word ghanta, asking how a senior Minister could speak this way.

The use of the slang word while speaking to a reporter did not befit either Vijayvargiya’s stature or the circumstances. I have interviewed him too, and I found him fond of using tatsam (Sanskrit words used unchanged in Hindi) rather than tadbhav (words that evolved while migrating from Sanskrit to Hindi). I rarely heard him use Hindustani, the pluricentric blend of Hindi and Urdu, in his speech.

Both fokat and ghanta are words found frequently in Hindi songs. An album, “Free Fokat Mein”, was released in 2022. Chaya Chandrakar sang “Fokat Fokat” in 2021. Apple released a music album titled “Fokat” in 2024. There is little controversy over “fokat”, which mostly means “free”, and “idle” in the context of time.

“Ghanta”, while fundamentally a Sanskrit word meaning bell or hour, has a ruder connotation. But it has found its way into Hindi film songs in its more carefree format.

But coming back to Indore, this is a city that won a “Water Plus” certification in 2021 and was praised for its wastewater management. Today, the residents of Bhagirathpura can tell you a lot about the wastewater, about its management, not so much.

Predictably, social media erupted, both for Indore’s fall and the Minister’s language. Rival parties campaigned against the “display of arrogance in the face of tragedy”. The Minister was forced to shift into damage control mode, citing sleepless nights spent working for the affected, affecting his speech. He claimed his words “came out wrong” due to his deep grief. The damage, however, was largely done.

When Vijayvargiya finally visited Bhagirathpura on January 1, he faced an angry crowd in what has been a secure urban bastion for the BJP for decades. Women blocked his path in the narrow bylanes, surrounding him with complaints they claimed had been ignored for months. “Kai dino se dooshit paani ki shikayat ki ja rahi hai lekin kisi ne sunvaai nahin ki” (We complained for days about the contaminated water, but nobody listened), said one resident. The resentment ran deep. When Vijayvargiya attempted to meet the family of one of the deceased, they refused. A relative, Roshini Yadav, aired her grievances publicly, describing the distress of a family that felt abandoned by the very State machinery meant to protect them.

The tragedy punctures the BJP’s developmental narrative in Madhya Pradesh. The project to bring piped Narmada water to Indore is a pet initiative of the ruling BJP, featuring prominently in promotional materials. It proclaims clean water from the sacred Narmada—except when it mingles with sewage beneath a toilet attached to a post office. The tender for a new pipeline, worth Rs.2.5 crore, was approved four months ago. It sat unopened until people started dying.

For those of us in the NCR region contemplating a move to smaller cities to escape the toxic air of Delhi, Noida, and Gurugram, Indore offers a cautionary tale. Escape the poisonous air; meet the poisonous water.

Ismail Serageldin, then World Bank vice president, said in August 1995: “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water—unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” In India, the scarcity of clean, potable water is still acute in many remote areas, as the Indore tragedy makes plain. Perhaps there has been too much focus on politics and political parties rather than on local governance and matters that affect people’s daily lives.

Amid the outrage in Indore and the political indifference, quiet flows the Narmada.

Write about any water woes that you might be facing in your areas.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Readers,

This Christmas, while visiting relatives in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, I was struck by two sets of headlines running side by side. One featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi attending the Christmas morning service at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption in Delhi, offering greetings that “the spirit of Christmas inspire harmony and goodwill in our society”. The other, unfolding across BJP-ruled States through the week, told a different story—of disruptions, intimidation, and hostility directed at Christian celebrations.

Some numbers for context: According to the United Christian Forum (UCF), 834 incidents of violence against Christians were recorded in 2024, up from 139 in 2014. As of November 2025, the forum had documented 706 incidents, with Uttar Pradesh (184) and Chhattisgarh (157) leading the count. Of the 579 incidents reported between January and September 2025, only 39 resulted in police cases—a 93 per cent gap in the documentation of these complaints.

This Christmas week was no exception. In Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) members sat outside the church at Bishop Conrad School, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting “Jai Shri Ram” in full view of the police. In Nalbari, Assam, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists stormed St Mary’s School in Panigaon, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Hindu Rashtra” before setting fire to Christmas decorations. VHP district secretary Bhaskar Deka stated: “We don’t want Christian festivals here.”

In Raipur, Chhattisgarh, a mob armed with wooden sticks vandalised Christmas decorations and smashed a Santa Claus figure at Magneto Mall on Christmas Eve during a State-wide bandh called by Sarva Hindu Samaj. The bandh followed a burial dispute in Kanker district’s Bade Teoda village, where a Christian man’s house had been torched and churches vandalised. Police registered an FIR against more than 30 unidentified persons.

In Odisha, viral videos showed men harassing street vendors selling Santa Claus hats, declaring: “This is Hindu Rashtra. You can’t sell Christian items here. Sell Lord Jagannath’s merchandise.” In Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, BJP city vice president Anju Bhargava was filmed confronting a blind woman at a Christmas gathering for disabled children, holding her face, twisting her arm, and telling her she would “remain blind in her next birth”. The incident occurred on December 20 at a church behind Hawabagh Women’s College.

In Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, four Catholic parishes were denied permission for Christmas carol singing after police refused to accept programme applications. The diocese of Jhabua approached the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which clarified that carol singing within Catholic homes is private religious practice and requires no official permission. Justice Jai Kumar Pillai noted that police approval is needed only for programmes held in public spaces.

In Haridwar, Uttarakhand, a Christmas event scheduled at Hotel Bhagirathi, run by the Uttar Pradesh Tourism Department on the banks of the Ganga, was cancelled after objections from Hindu groups. Ujjwal Pandit of the Ganga Sevak Dal warned that Christmas celebrations on the riverbanks would “not be tolerated”, calling them an insult to Haridwar’s sanctity. The RSS echoed the sentiment, with State official Padamji opposing “events related to foreign culture” on the Ganga.

In Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, Bajrang Dal members confronted Christian women and children wearing Santa Claus hats on December 22, accusing them of “proselytisation” and ordering them to leave. Videos show activists shouting “Go home” and “Celebrate it in your own homes”. Delhi Police later described the episode as a “minor and momentary verbal disagreement”.

In Kerala’s Palakkad, RSS worker Ashwin Raj was arrested for attacking children aged 10–15 years, who were carolling from house to house. The provocation, according to the complaint, was the word “CPI(M)” written on a drum the children had borrowed from a local party office. BJP leader C. Krishnakumar later claimed the children had consumed alcohol—a claim their families rejected.

In Rajasthan’s Dungarpur district, RSS and Bajrang Dal members disrupted Sunday mass at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Bichhiwara village on December 14, storming in mid-service and accusing the parish of “forced conversions”. Parish priest Fr Rajesh Sarel said about 50 people entered during his homily. Police were present, Bishop Devprasad Ganawa of Udaipur noted, “but they were just onlookers”.

On Christmas Day, Bajrang Dal members created a disturbance at a private school in Rajasthan’s Nagaur district, allegedly threatening children and assaulting the principal, Shaitanram Changal. Nearly 40 students were present. Police detained three persons.

In Haryana’s Fatehabad district, police dispersed a Christmas celebration at the home of a teacher, Chiman Lal, after objections from outsiders alleging conversion activities. Lal later clarified that December 25 was also his birthday and that the gathering “posed no threat to anyone”.

Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien responded to the Prime Minister’s church visit with a post on X: “Love? Peace? Compassion? Harmony? Goodwill? Christmas?” A question arises: are these cadres exceeding their brief, or has the BJP, in its third term, acquired what might be called a Bhasmasura problem? In Hindu mythology, Bhasmasura’s boon eventually turned against its giver.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India condemned what it called an “alarming” rise in attacks, describing them as “egregious and dehumanising”, and demanded the immediate dismissal of Anju Bhargava from the BJP. It also flagged hate-filled digital posters in Chhattisgarh calling for a bandh against Christians on December 24.

Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves of the Human Rights Law Network noted that anti-conversion laws offer “cover” to police and right-wing groups. Of 283 cases registered under Madhya Pradesh’s law between January 2020 and July 2025, nearly 70 per cent remain pending. Of the 86 concluded cases, 50 ended in acquittals and only eight in convictions.

Not everything was bleak. A painting by Pakistani-American artist Hamama Tul Bushra depicting Mary and Christ circulated warmly online. A video of Mumbai’s 300-year-old St Thomas Cathedral opening its Christmas choral evening with the national anthem also went viral, the Wild Voices Choir transitioning from Jana Gana Mana to carols.

Those policing Christmas might consider what prominent Hindu figures have said. The Vrindavan-based saint Premanand Govind Sharan has spoken of Jesus as a great soul and a powerful spiritual presence, while warning against religious disparagement.

Ramakrishna Math and Mission centres across India continued their long tradition of celebrating Christmas in the spirit of sarva dharma sambhav. Ramakrishna Paramhans viewed Jesus as a divine incarnation, a vision carried forward by Swami Vivekananda, who regarded Christianity with deep respect. Vivekananda travelled India carrying onlythe Bhagavad Gita and The Imitation of Christ, translating parts of the latter into Bengali in 1889.

Do those attacking Christian symbols claim to know Hinduism better than Vivekananda? He opposed forcible conversion, but he also urged Hindu society to introspect rather than externalise blame.

The contrast between the Prime Minister’s cathedral visit and the conduct of Sangh Parivar cadres raises a question for the ruling dispensation. Christian groups argue that symbolic gestures must be matched by action, including protection of constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. The UCF has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah alleging that police often collude with Hindutva groups or look away.

Where, in any religious tradition, is such hostility sanctioned? The pattern this Christmas—from malls to schools to private homes—suggests more than isolated excess. It points to a climate in which declarations of “Hindu Rashtra” are made openly, repeatedly, and with little consequence.

We would like to hear your views on the pattern of incidents this Christmas season.

Until the next newsletter,

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

Dear Reader,

At a packed rally at Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi on December 14, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said he skipped his son’s eight-hour operation in Bengaluru to be there because defending the rights of 140 crore Indians mattered more than family duty. His aides, family members, and even doctors had been calling him to the hospital, he said, but he chose the party’s “Vote Chor Gaddi Chhod” (Vote thief, leave the throne) event and a Parliament session instead.

Kharge praised Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra for carrying the Congress’ banner and cast Rahul’s campaign as a crusade for the nation’s soul.

It was easy to spot an old political reverberation in the crowd’s response: in 2023, when Kharge skipped the Independence Day ceremony at Delhi’s Red Fort, the BJP mocked him for attending a “family-controlled programme” at Congress headquarters instead. Back then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had wondered aloud how a political party could be run by one family. Instead of fading, that jibe now hangs in the air.

People close to Kharge describe him as the archetypal Indian family man. A senior Delhi journalist who has followed him for years recalled being told her interview would have to shift to Bengaluru because Kharge was missing his family and wanted to spend Ugadi with them. She flew there and was greeted with an array of traditional dishes. Another reporter remembered him abruptly excusing himself from an off-the-record session, saying he had to be with his dharam patni (wedded wife) on their anniversary.

Still, politicians often prefer to cast themselves as duty-first figures when cameras are rolling, and Kharge’s choice at Ramlila Maidan fit that script. For what it’s worth, his son Priyank is an MLA, and his son-in-law Radhakrishna is an MP, a detail that invites its own side glances.

Duty over family is not unique to Congress. In April 2020, when Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath learnt that his father had died, he continued a meeting with officials on quarantining students returning from Kota during the pandemic, explaining later that duty to 23 crore people kept him from his father’s last rites.

Stories like these trace back into India’s political memory. Former Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, while arguing a case in court, received a telegram that his wife had died. He folded it into his pocket without looking again and finished his argument before anyone around him even grasped what had happened.

Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh recalled being denied parole to attend his mother’s funeral while he was in jail during the Emergency, shaving his head behind bars before his brothers performed the rites.

Still, this intricate choreography of duty and family can warp into more troubling shapes. After the Congress’ 2019 Lok Sabha defeat, Rahul Gandhi criticised party elders Kamal Nath, Digvijaya Singh, and Ashok Gehlot in a private meeting, an exchange that friends of the party say was as much about personal frustrations as political blame.

Sometimes a relative’s crisis becomes a political controversy. In 1989, then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed faced criticism after his daughter Rubaiya was kidnapped and freed only when the government released five detained militants. The case dogged him for years.

On other occasions, family feuds spill into the public eye. The Rashtriya Janata Dal’s first family in Bihar offered a recent example: Tej Pratap Yadav’s expulsion from the party and Rohini Acharya’s attacks on Tejashwi Yadav left patriarch Lalu Prasad Yadav, then 77 and ailing, shuttling between squabblers and telling everyone it was an “internal matter”. Meanwhile, Nitish Kumar has mostly steered clear of inviting kin into his political orbit.

Across party lines, awkward intersections happen.

When Congress veteran A.K. Antony’s son Anil Antony joined the BJP in 2023, the father chose silence. It was the son who spoke instead, drawing a careful line between blood and belief. “He is my father, but our politics are different,” Anil said, as if stating a rule of geometry. Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Antony broke that silence only once, wishing that his son would lose and the Congress candidate would win. That, too, came to pass.

Former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri once had his son Sunil pay for using the official car for a brief drive, instructing his secretary to collect payment from his wife and deposit it into the treasury. Fourteen kilometres, no shortcuts. It is a small scene now, almost alien compared to today’s standards.

A telling moment from the 1970s came when then-Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur was asked to help his brother-in-law get a job. He did not decline politely. He handed the man Rs.50 and told him to buy a razor and return to his family’s barber trade.

Even Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that duty to the nation should reign above personal desire, found the philosophy tearing at his own household. His son Harilal’s resistance to his path became the wrenching subject of the film Gandhi, My Father (2007), where Akshaye Khanna’s performance lingered as a study in personal cost.

In Gaya, I once saw how this tension played out away from the corridors of power. Dashrath Manjhi, the “Mountain Man” whose decades-long chiselling through a hillock became folklore and films, endured criticism at home for ignoring his family while chasing a mission. After his death, his son Bhagirath publicly rebuked Congress and Rahul Gandhi for denying him a ticket in the October 2025 Bihar election, a twist that turned devotion into grievance.

There is also the rare case of a couple who sidestep the usual tension: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her husband Parakala Prabhakar have stayed married despite stark ideological differences, turning dinner conversations into their own brand of détente.

I have seen my share of unlikely political cross-family friendships, too. Congress leader Rajiv Shukla is married to senior BJP leader Ravishankar Prasad’s sister, and in the Rajya Sabha, they trade banter that reminds you how political walls can rise while family bridges stay intact.

“Politics makes a wall; family builds a bridge,” a friend observes. The intersections of family and politics rarely make neat sense. They do not need to. They only need to be noticed.

Until the next newsletter—same families, same politics, new storylines.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline