Indholdsfortegnelse for January 6, 2025 i India Today

What leaders propose, the gods of democracy, the voters, dis-pose in their own way. For Narendra Modi, the crowning glory of his being prime minister for a decade was to be the induction into a rarefied league of statesmen in 2024. For that, he had to emulate the record held by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who had three consecutive terms with a full majority in Parliament. Modi intended to achieve the distinction with a thumping mandate in the general election. The year began auspiciously enough, when as yajmaan (patron) he led the consecration ceremony of the Balak Ram idol at the new and awe-inspiring Ram Mandir in Ayodhya on January 22. The event was regarded as a spectacular demonstration of Hindu resurgence and pride. Modi captured the zeitgeist…

Mamata Banerjee wrote a memoir, titled My Unforgettable Memories, back in 2012. Still in her first year at Writers’ Building, after a landmark agitation in Singur dislodged the longincumbent and by then recumbent Left, it was meant as a midjourney logbook. Jottings at the end of one phase of her ‘ragstoriches’ life, it only marked the onset of another. Since then, she has been writing the subsequent chapters on the slate of Bengal’s public life. Through exhausting electoral cycles, she has seen it all—cultic euphoria, high and low tides, survival anxiety. Yet, if an updated edition ever comes out, 2024 will contribute some unforgettable memories—many of the sort she’d like to forget. One of them even threatened to become her own Singur moment. As 2025 dawns, though, West Bengal…

As a manifest sign of the psychology of contemporary India—its social and political face, body and self-image—the Ram temple at Ayodhya has few parallels. The opening of its gates seemed to offer a kind of closure on a key chapter in its evolution. For the devout, a moment of spiritual euphoria and fulfilment. For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a key ideological promise embodied in reality. For others, a symbol of the political power that religion wields in modern India—the event calendar, with a prime minister leading a grand pran pratishtha three months before a general election, did nothing to allay those stark associations. As it happened, the expected electoral harvests didn’t quite materialise, and political well-being resulted because Ram was supplemented with latter-day ‘Paltu Rams’. Saffron, notably, lost even…

Everybody wanted a piece of Diljit Dosanjh in 2024. The Ambanis did, for their son Anant’s big pre-wedding bash in Vantara, where the Punjabi singer followed Rihanna’s act and still had the who’s who of India jumping on their feet. The filmmakers of Kalki 2898 AD, Jigra, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 and Baby John did. As all had a Diljit single on their soundtracks. And then there were thousands who came to see him perform live during his ‘Dil-Luminati’ tour—both in India and abroad. Beyond the energetic atmosphere he creates in these evenings, Diljit’s biggest success lies in how far he has taken Punjabi pop within India. Concerts in cities like Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Guwahati show that he’s the rare north Indian artiste whose music transcends linguistic barriers, with even…

Gukesh Dommaraju doesn’t have many childhood memories but there is one that’s clearly etched in his mind. As a seven-year-old rookie chess player, standing with his father far back in a packed room at Chennai’s Hyatt Regency hotel to watch Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen duel it out for the world championship title. The kid couldn’t see the black-and-white squares but the sight of the two greats “was inspiring” enough that he envisioned a dream then and there. “I thought it’d be cool to be inside that glass box one day,” he says. Four years later, in a now viral clip he’d articulate the desire better: “I want to become the youngest world chess champion.” On December 12, 2024, Gukesh, all of 18, fulfilled the wish by winning a thrilling contest…

The year 2024 will stand as a critical inflection point in Arvind Kejriwal’s political career in more ways than one. For, this is the year the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader—the man who was sworn to political hygiene as his original USP—found himself at the centre of a criminal investigation, making history for the wrong reasons as the first ever sitting CM to be jailed. By September, he had renounced the post that gave him his first administrative face, that of Delhi chief minister. And by November, out on bail, he had hit the streets again in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana, in a bid to try and reener-gise brand AAP. When he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on charges related to the so-called liquor scam, that too just…

The year 2024 unfolded in Jharkhand like a bit of an earthquake. At the epicentre of this seismic event stood a couple, chief minister Hemant Soren and his wife Kalpana. Their remarkable comeback after weathering intense storms made for political theatre compelling enough to enter tribal folklore, and then spill over to the national narrative. The drama had its genesis on January 31, when Hemant tendered his resignation from the CM’s post—he was to be arrested by the Enforcement Directorate, after hours of interrogation at his official residence on money-laundering allegations. For many, that would have signalled the end of a political career. For Hemant and his wife Kalpana, it marked the beginning of an extraordinary saga. Faced with a leadership vacuum and the shadows of impending oblivion, the couple…

Across the world, millions of Indian fans had their heart in their mouth. It was a World Cup final, the final over. And South Africa required only 16 runs, very gettable in the slam-bang T20 format. Things seemed on course for another descent into doom when David Miller lofted a wide full toss from Hardik Pandya. Though not a clean thwack coming off the meat of the bat, the ball soared towards the boundary—it had six written all over its destiny. But Suryakumar Yadav had other plans. Sprinting along the rope, he executed that extraordinary double swoop: catching the ball just inside, flicking it aloft as his momentum propelled him over the boundary, and reclaiming it upon re-entering the field. If Kapil Dev’s devilish back-ward sprint to catch Vivian Richards…

Q. You talk of chess fondly, touching on beauty and aesthetics. But at just six-and-a-half years, what drew you to the game? Before chess, we tried tennis, abacus and even skating. My family used to play chess as a hobby at home. I got interested in it and learned the rules. There was this summer camp in school when I was in the first standard and I tried out chess. There it was my first coach, Bhaskar Sir, who said I have a knack for it and should take it further. The thing is, chess had all these pieces, like toys, and I could just play around with them. Once I started to understand the rules, there was this unlimited beauty in chess. But I’m still learning…Vishy Sir has been playing…

The year couldn’t have begun any worse for the coalition better known by its backronym, INDIA, than the somewhat clunky ‘Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance’. It was just six months before that it was born, named and heralded as the Opposition’s best shot at challenging the decade-long dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And yet here was one of its paternal spirits and most visible faces, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, defecting to the very camp he had been plotting to defeat! Nitish’s pirouette to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which sent shock-waves through the political landscape, was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Congress’s keenness to capture centrality and control. For a coalition that had positioned itself as the panacea for precisely such tendencies in the…

If there was any trace of worry within the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) ahead of the big battle in November, they were good at hiding it. More likely, they were luxuriating in how well the Lok Sabha election had gone: 31 of Maharashtra’s 48 seats, leads in 153 assembly segments. A comfortable buffer. Too comfortable. The Opposition triad fought over the fruits of war much before they had ripened. Meanwhile, there was another triumvirate, plotting away at a different script—the three horsemen of the MVA’s apocalypse. Devendra Fadnavis, Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde: one allegedly not a mass leader, one with an apparently shrinking base, and one with his soufflé rising but perhaps not enough to pull up the other two. They gave the sense of being unequal to the…

It had been a long hiatus for Kashmiri netas, much of the stock-in-trade of their political life had been in suspended animation for far too long. A decade had passed since the last election. There hadn’t been a regular government for eight years. And after August 2019, when the old bridge of Article 370 was pulled down and the state shrunk in size and in formal conception, even ceasing to be a state, everything went into deep freeze—the entire infinitude of everyday interaction with the public sphere. Omar Abdullah, former chief minister (2008-2014), was among those who also felt that other effect: presaging the abnormal hibernation imposed by Covid-19, their turfs were abridged to the confines of homes. It was a total political lockdown. But 2024 came as a year of…