Counterview

Counterview News   A new academic study has drawn fresh attention to Sankalp Bhoomi, a modest memorial site in Vadodara's Sayaji Baug, arguing that the spot where B.R. Ambedkar spent five difficult hours in 1917 has quietly grown into one of Gujarat's most significant sites of Dalit political and cultural assertion.

By Vijay Prashad   President Xi Jinping’s forthcoming visit to the United States must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures. In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

By A.V. Yadappanavar*  Recruitment delays, subject-specific shortages, multigrade classrooms and administrative burdens continue to undermine the quality of school education. *** India has made significant progress in expanding access to schooling and increasing the size of its teaching workforce. Yet a troubling paradox persists: there are more teachers than before, but many schools still struggle to secure the right teachers for the right subjects and locations.

By Dr. P.K. Gupta*  Andhbhakti literally means blind devotion. In present-day Hindi it is often used, sometimes pejoratively, for uncritical loyalty to a religious teacher, political leader, party or ideology. The term should be used with care. Deep devotion is not necessarily blind, and unquestioning obedience is not unique to Hinduism or India. It becomes dangerous when loyalty silences evidence, conscience, reasoning and accountability. Modernity challenges this submission wherever it requires denial of factual claims that cannot withstand reasoned examination.

By Syed Ali Mujtaba  Filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia recently argued that the rising tide of Islamophobia in Indian society has made its way into Hindi cinema. Speaking at the Editors Guild of India’s Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on September 4, 2026, Dhulia said filmmakers are part of the same society in which anti-Muslim propaganda has grown like a cancerous growth. The changing political and social environment, he suggested, has inevitably influenced the stories being told on screen.

By Ravi Ranjan*  Raghuvir Sahay's brief poem "Your Laughter" -- Āpkī Haṃsī -- transforms an apparently casual conversational gesture into a profound diagnosis of democratic decline. The poem's speaker listens as an interlocutor observes that the poor are exploited, democracy faces its final hour, corruption is universal, and helplessness pervades society—yet each grim pronouncement is followed by the same refrain: "you said and laughed."

Counterview News   A scathing independent citizens' inquiry has concluded that the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river, one of India's most ambitious multipurpose dams, has systematically violated the legal and human rights of tens of thousands of displaced families while overstating its economic benefits and understating its ecological costs.

By Bhim Singh Rawat   There is little doubt that growing encroachment on Delhi’s Yamuna floodplain, or khadar, has created the risk of turning natural flooding into a disaster. Because the floodplain has not been properly demarcated, the O-Zone, which covers the Yamuna khadar, is not being effectively implemented.

By Dirgha Datar   An Indian Institute of Technology is commonly imagined as a symbol of modernity, merit and knowledge. Yet a recent controversy at IIT Mandi has brought an older question into this supposedly modern space: who gets to decide what is considered normal, legitimate and respectable knowledge about caste?