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3 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Sushanta Talukdar |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
In a special one-day session of the Assam Assembly on June 9, 2025, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma invoked an old 1950 Act to declare that his government would henceforth push back into Bangladesh anyone who had illegally entered Assam after March 24, 1971, and had been identified as a foreigner if her/his case was not pending before a court. He said it would be done under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, without involving the Foreigners Tribunals (FTs).
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3 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy |Greeshma Kuthar
Professor Monirul Hussain, 73, recounted a conversation that he had a few years ago in Guwahati. At the end of an engaging chat with a stranger during a journey, the professor was asked his name. When he gave his name, the stranger exclaimed, “Oh! I thought you were Axomiya.” Perturbed, the professor asked how the man defined “Assamese” and if it included only those who had Hindu-sounding names, but the conversation soon petered off. Prof.
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3 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ayesha Minhaz |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
Less than an hour’s drive from Hyderabad and about half an hour away from the city’s airport, a brand new city is in the works amidst fertile agricultural lands and existing habitations. The Telangana government hopes that the new city will herald a new phase of development involving large-scale infrastructure projects, industrial parks, and urban expansion. However, many farmers, farm labourers, and environmental activists are opposed to the project.
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3 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy |Angshuman Choudhury
Over the last one month, India has sent hundreds of supposed “illegal immigrants” across the border into Bangladesh. Exact figures are hard to come by, but media reports from Bangladesh claim that India has so far forcibly pushed 1,200 people into the country through the borders in Assam and West Bengal. The BJP-led Assam government has taken on a frontal role in this endeavour, with Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announcing the so-called operation in a press briefing on May 11.
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3 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Vaishna Roy |C.S. Venkiteswaran
It was just months ago that the grave human tragedy unfolding in Manipur came to an uneasy pause, although violence, suspicion, and anger still punctuate the days and divide the people there. That tragedy was overseen and indeed accelerated by a partisan Chief Minister whose inaction in the face of the most brutal violence was ignored by the government at the Centre for almost two years before he was allowed to resign.
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4 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
No one visited that library. Even so, the librarian opened it every evening in the hope that someone might visit to borrow a book. He would sit on the half-wall of the veranda of that old building for a short while. Then, he would go indoors and sit on the chair—in somewhat worse shape than him—behind the table and start reading. Since the past few years, he had been reading the massive and authoritative dictionary, the Sabtadataaraavali, by Srikanteswaram.
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4 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Soumitra Das |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
Charts, maps, routes, architectural drawings, wheels, pottery, utensils, rural life, daily labour—these images and ideas repeat like a motif in the works of the artist Prasanta Sahu. This is not conventionally artistic material, and therein lies the point of Sahu’s oeuvre: he makes each one of them tell the stories of their humdrum lives, which come together in the end to speak of the interconnectedness of life. The aesthetics of ordinary lives is what concerns him.
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4 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy |Shreevatsa Nevatia
In 1898, William Claxton Peppé, a colonial landowner, ordered the excavation of a stupa on his estate in Piprahwa, a village in present-day Uttar Pradesh. His team unearthed five reliquaries that had in them bone fragments, ash, and gemstones, one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in Buddhist history. Inscribed in early Brahmi script, an urn identified the depositors as members of the Buddha’s own Shakya clan, who had enshrined here the relics of the Buddha.
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4 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Gowhar Geelani |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
In her latest book, Lōal Kashmir, the filmmaker and author Mehak Jamal gathers 16 stories of intimacy and separation, tracing how Kashmiri couples sustained relationships under extraordinary constraints. Through letters, medical networks, and disrupted digital channels, these narratives trace the emotional landscape of a region where affection often had to navigate the machinery of surveillance.
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4 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | R.K. Radhakrishnan |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
The honeymoon is over and the sheen is wearing off the National People’s Power coalition in Sri Lanka after some questionable deals it made to control local bodies. The NPP has managed to gain control over a vast majority of the local government organisations in the island nation, but what bothers many is the fact that the NPP entered into deals with “undesirable elements” to capture power in at least 40 of these councils.
