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Chennai's residents are not dodging a tax. They are reading the bill against the street outside, flooded, unconnected and unrepaired, and asking the oldest question in municipal politics: what, exactly, was paid for?
· 2 min read
The Bengaluru warehouse row is not a language misunderstanding. It is a test of self-respect at work: no wage should require a worker to surrender their mother tongue to keep a job.
· 2 min read
Releasing nurses at night ends a police day, not a dispute. Until the TVK government answers regularisation and equal pay in writing, every protest it disperses will return larger.
· 2 min read
The Kerala KAAPA judgment did not free an innocent man. It exposed a state that took liberty with missing, illegible paperwork. Preventive detention without a readable file is power without proof.
· 2 min read
Farmer representatives are right to insist that bilateral talks with Karnataka must not bypass the Supreme Court framework. A river governed by a judgment cannot be renegotiated by press release.
· 1 min read
Periyar taught that self-respect begins with the right to be counted. Telangana's unsigned forms, rejected after officials checked them, show how a republic can fail through paperwork nobody signed.
· 2 min read
Karnataka's ASHA workers are asking for Rs 15,000 a month and tools provided by the state for digital health records. An honorarium is not a wage, and gratitude is not pay.
· 2 min read
Opinion: Vetri 150 promised 150 days of rural work and has delivered ten in 91 days. Periyar's test was self-respect, and a welfare promise, as the Dravidian tradition held, is a debt.
· 2 min read
When MPs marching to the Election Commission are detained 100 metres from its door, the institution has not defended itself; it has confessed its fear. A voter roll that citizens cannot question is not a register. It is a verdict delivered in advance.
· 2 min read
A Gazan survivor writes that recovery cannot begin while the danger never ends. This is not a humanitarian crisis to be managed — it is a genocide with perpetrators, and every demand that Gaza heal on schedule is a demand to absolve the killers.
· 3 min read
From the nurses invited for talks and then arrested to the fishers facing barricades over a ₹1,200-crore palace: the TVK government answers every protest with police and every question with silence. Periyar and Anna would recognise the disease.
· 2 min read
Five hundred closed schools is not a crisis of discipline, it is a verdict on a state that starved its classrooms for years. France's students did what unions and petitions could not: they made the rot visible. Power concedes nothing to petitions; it concedes to refusal.
· 2 min read
Opinion: five months after the general election, two MLAs resigned, joined the ruling TVK, and were renominated on its whistle symbol. Dhinakaran wants the ECI to punish serial resigners — right about the symptom. The disease: a seat treated as private property — traded and re-auctioned at will.
· 2 min read
A state highways signboard near Sathankulam carried place names in Tamil, Hindi and English, in violation of Tamil Nadu's two-language policy. Two engineers were suspended. The episode says less about the painters and more about a ruling party with no ideological roots to anchor it.
· 2 min read
From the 'save democracy' march on the Election Commission to Ladakh's anniversary of unanswered grief, India is witnessing a season of mutinies against unaccountable power. The street has become the one parliament the powerful cannot adjourn.
· 2 min read
A year after India's blind women lifted the T20 World Cup, the captain still waits for her promised house site and her teammates for jobs. The garlands have wilted, and so have the promises. This is how the Indian state treats its daughters once the cameras leave.
· 3 min read
Opinion: five years after an SUV linked to a Union minister's son mowed down farmers at Lakhimpur Kheri, the trial cannot even find a competent prosecutor - while in Punjab the CM's aide accused of running a posting racket sat protected for months
· 2 min read
One Punjab MLA wept on camera about empty classrooms and was suspended. One CM's aide allegedly ran a transfer-posting racket and is defended. Power attacks truth-tellers and shelters fixers.
· 2 min read
First the sanitation workers, then the nurses: the TVK government's answer to Tamil Nadu's striking workers has been the police van. A party that promised change is governing with the oldest trick in the book, and the workers it arrests will remember.
· 2 min read
The Madurantakam and Dharapuram bypolls exist for one reason: two legislators resigned, crossed to the ruling party, and were renominated from the seats they vacated. Defection is no longer a scandal in Tamil Nadu politics. It is a business model.
· 2 min read
OPINION: When 41 people died in Karur, a probe team was formed within hours, before the court order even arrived. A month after the High Court ordered an SIT into the kidney racket, it has not begun. Justice is being rationed by who the victims are.
· 3 min read
The INDIA bloc's march to the Election Commission is not theatre but a symptom: when a constitutional umpire cannot answer who changed Form 6, citizens stop trusting the scoreboard. Institutions rot when accountability dies, and the street becomes the last court.
· 3 min read
The Chief Justice said the court never approved the modified Form 6 and asked who changed it. The Election Commission answered with a press note. Voters deserve a plain answer to a plain question.
· 2 min read
Stalin called Vijay a 'Reels CM' who treats governance like a shooting spot. The mockery is cheap — but the charge beneath it has receipts: three months of falling GST revenue, rising prices, and a four-month-old government whose first instinct was to shield police files from RTI.
· 2 min read
A mother complained in 2004 and the police buried it. Twenty-two years later, a WhatsApp message unearthed what money and power had kept filed away. The Veeramani case is not a failure of the system — it is the system, working as designed.
· 2 min read
On bypoll eve, Vijay warned the DMK not to 'attack' women in his circle, while DMK ministers face a Rs 1-crore defamation suit. Both camps have discovered women's dignity — as a campaign weapon. Periyar would have asked a harder question: where were you when the cameras were off?
· 2 min read
Madurantakam and Dharapuram vote today because two MLAs resigned within weeks of being elected and defected to the ruling party. The taxpayer funds the bypoll, the voter is asked to rubber-stamp the deal, and democracy is told to treat it as normal.
· 3 min read
Two sitting Election Commissioners objected 14 times. The Supreme Court said it never approved the modified Form 6. And still the Commission answers every question with repetition as though it were evidence. When the ruled must impeach the referee, the republic is on notice.
· 2 min read
A Mumbai suburban collector has ordered 6.75 acres reserved for Mathadi workers' housing back to the state after a housing society cut a developer deal without permission. It is a rare reversal of the city's oldest habit: turning land meant for the poor into profit for the rich.
· 2 min read
A Karnataka prisons DIG stands accused of trading a convict's freedom for his wife's body. If the allegation holds, it exposes the oldest corruption of all: custody converted into currency, and a human being into a commodity.
· 2 min read
Another night, another overloaded boat on the Congo: the poor travel the river in the dark because the roads do not exist — and the state calls it an accident, again. It is not an accident. It is a choice, made for them.
· 2 min read
They left the farm promised the factory, and found the food counter instead. A new study confirms what every migrant worker already knew: India's growth story has no room for its workers — only for their cheap labour.
· 2 min read
The Supreme Court refused to suspend CEC Gyanesh Kumar — but its warning that non-unanimous ECI decisions can be 'taken back' turns the next hearing into a trial of the Commission's own records. Power that hides behind procedure has met procedure as the weapon.
· 2 min read
Opinion: A government that floats trial balloons on Hindi imposition is not governing, it is content-creating. Tamil Nadu's two-language policy was won in the streets, not in reels. Power that treats the people's lifeline as an experiment has forgotten whom it serves.
· 2 min read
Campaigning has ended in Madurantakam and Dharapuram. Tomorrow, two constituencies vote in the first electoral test of Vijay's TVK government — a test the ruling party manufactured by luring away two elected MLAs. This is not just about who wins. It is about whether those in power will finally learn the oldest lesson in democracy: the people are the masters, not the rulers.
· 3 min read
Opinion: Dharapuram votes tomorrow in an election manufactured by resignation — an MLA who won on one ticket, quit within weeks, and recontests in ruling-party colours. When mandates become renewable options, the voter becomes a prop. The EC should bar quick-resigners from the bypolls they create.
· 2 min read
Flávio Bolsonaro's first-round win — 47% against Lula's 45% — is not a fresh face but a family inheritance: the machine of a jailed coup-plotter, rebuilt under his eldest son. Brazil's October 25 runoff is a referendum on whether authoritarianism can simply change its name.
· 2 min read
