Daily Hindu Editorials

Saudi Arabia has to do a lot more to begin a new journey in liberalisation In the latest in a series of steps aimed at enhancing women’s rights, Saudi Arabia has invited women to join its military. Saudi nationals aged between 25 and 35 were given the opportunity to apply for positions with the rank of soldier in Riyadh, Mecca, al-Qassim and Medina. Earlier this year, women were allowed to attend football matches. Last year, King Salman issued a decree ending the ban on women driving. Supporters of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, King Salman’s 32-year-old son, say these steps are part of the Prince’s broader reform agenda. After consolidating power, he had reined in the infamous Saudi religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is empowered with enforcing the kingdom’s strict morality code. Last month, a member of the country’s top clerical body said Saudi women need not wear the abaya, a full-length, loose-fitting robe. Local rep...

A Supreme Court Bench will decide whether the law has to be interpreted expansively or in a narrow sense In July 2011, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government embarked on an ambitious project to rewrite the law on land acquisition. How the government acquired land from private parties had long been the subject of heated dispute, often resulting in violent conflict. Several previous governments had made attempts to amend the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, but none had met with much success and the Act continued as an instrument of state oppression and forced displacement. It was a milestone achievement of the UPA government when the historic Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act was passed in September 2013 with the full support of all political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party. In fact, amendments suggested by the then Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, were readily accepted a...

For the BJP, the import of its victory in Tripura goes beyond numbers There is a reason that the Bharatiya Janata Party is disproportionately pleased with its performance in Tripura, which sends only two members to the Lok Sabha. From zero to 35 seats in the 60-member Assembly in five years is unarguably no mean electoral accomplishment. But having done this by beating the Left Front, its strongest ideological opponent, even if not the biggest political threat nationally, has given Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah a special satisfaction. Mr. Modi wanted a victory in Tripura to be celebrated as much as the victory in Uttar Pradesh, which sends the largest number of members to the Lok Sabha. Mr. Shah saw in Tripura a reason for his party workers in West Bengal and Kerala to be extremely happy. The BJP likes to imagine that the Left has wielded a disproportionate influence on political discourse, resulting in pushing the entire Sangh Parivar into a place of polit...

Throwing free trade out of the window will make Americans and everyone else poorer World leaders did well to avoid protectionist trade policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. After all, they had learned their lessons from the global trade war of the 1930s which deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, or so it was thought. American President Donald Trump last week announced that his administration would soon impose tariffs on the import of steel and aluminium into the U.S. for an indefinite period of time. The European Union, one of the largest trading partners of the U.S., has since vowed to return the favour through retaliatory measures targeting American exporters. The EU is expected to come out with a list of over 100 items imported from the U.S. that will be subject to scrutiny. For his part, Mr. Trump has justified the decision to impose protective tariffs by citing the U.S.’s huge trade deficit with the rest of the world. He explained his logic in a tweet...

The timing of cinema superstar Kamal Haasan’s entry into politics can be considered brilliant or too little too late, depending on the prognosis for Tamil Nadu’s troubled polity. The death of former Chief Minister and head of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), Jayalalithaa, in December 2016, on the one hand and the stepping back from active politics of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) supremo, M. Karunanidhi on the other have produced a leadership vacuum that has shaken the very foundations of governance in the State.This has been manifested in the meltdown of the AIADMK into bitter factionalism and in the unleashing of a cycle of power struggles to control the reins of the party. At one point, three separate vectors of power vied for the party crown, led by Edappadi K. Palaniswami, O. Panneerselvam, and T.T.V. Dinakaran, respectively. Simultaneously, the fortunes of the DMK have slipped into uncharted territory, with the party’s mantle going to Mr. Karunanid...

Of the three States whose Assembly election results were declared on March 3, Tripura’s was doubtlessly the most stunning. Tripura has been the safest Left bastion since the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front first swept to power in 1978. Only once since then, in 1988, did the Left Front lose to the Congress-TUJS (Tripura Upajati Juba Samity) alliance, but it returned to power in 1993. Since then it has been in power, with Manik Sarkar as Chief Minister since 1998. So for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to emerge out of nowhere and score a spectacular victory by getting a majority in the Assembly on its own is nothing short of a miracle. Beneath this surprise lies a cobweb of contradictions that the BJP’s election managers, especially Sunil Deodhar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll manager in Varanasi, seem to have managed so well. The Tripura manoeuvre By striking an alliance with the tribal Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura ( IPFT )  which ...