Eram Agha

“I HAVE A DREAM,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. “When India completes 75 years of independence, in 2022, we can double the income of our farmer brothers and sisters.” Modi was addressing a farmers’ rally at Bareilly in February 2016, and was hard-selling his government’s newly launched schemes for farmers. He framed it as an uphill task. To push through the initiatives, he said, he needed the cooperation of Indian states.

THE DELHI OFFICE ofthe Archaeological Survey of Indiawas thrown into a frenzy on 21 July 2023. A district court in Varanasi had ordered the director general of the ASI to put together a team to carry out a “scientific investigation/ survey/ excavation” at the Gyanvapi Masjid site and submit a report in two weeks. Things had to move fast. “It was overnight—it was that hurried,” an ASI official who was present in the office that day told me, on condition of anonymity.

A day before the second phase of polling in Jharkhand, an election video went viral on social media. The video, posted by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s official Twitter account, shows a large horde of Muslims, which included several children, moving into a middle-class house. At the entrance of the house is a flag of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. The video portrays the horde as uncouth, running amok in the house—much to the horror of the family living there.