Above the Fold: Top stories of the day
1. Five people died and dozens were injured after a lorry collided with a train in Andhra Pradesh's Anantapur district early on Monday morning.
2. A new book from the Indian Army seeking to make stories about past wars more reader-friendly also attempts to insist that India won the 1965 war with Pakistan, which is generally remembered as ending with a stalemate.
3. A Supreme Court panel has said a massive Rs 2,300 crore project to put a railway line through the Western Ghats in Karnataka would cause "huge and irreparable damage" to the environment.
The Big Story: Picking up the peace pieces
Now to figure out what happens next. With India and Pakistan having cancelled the proposed National Security Advisor-level talks, and each side blaming the other for it, those hoping for actual discussions in New Delhi and Islamabad will have to carefully plan out their next moves to avoid the mess of the last few days. There are a few bright spots ahead: a proposed meeting of the chiefs of the Border Security Force and the Pakistani Rangers, a potential meet between the prime ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
But for now, relations between the two countries are set to remain strained. Worse, the cancellation of talks could prompt sections in Pakistan to ramp up the other sort of engagement with India: The kind that led to terrorists attacking Udhampur and Gurdaspur. Another major terror attack that can be traced to Pakistani territory will put Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in a difficult spot, since it has given up the "stern action" of calling off talks, and will be vulnerable to calls for a muscular response.
If India does indeed decided to quickly figure out a way to take the discussions forward, it will have to learn to be comfortable with the separatists and ensure the rest of the government focuses more on successful talks rather than #56inch chest-thumping. Bellicose reactions could turn very dangerous very quickly.
This is Pakistan's super secret diplomatic weapon to beat India: sarcasm. Meanwhile, The nation wants to know: Why did Dawood Ibrahim's wife say he was sleeping when Times Now called?
Politicking & Policying
1. The Army claims to have intercepted three suspected terrorists in Handwara, Kashmir with intelligence inputs suggesting more such infiltration might occur.
2. The Indian Express' continuing series on communal violence in Bihar includes this report on how a kite and a urinating boy led to a religious clash.
3. Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, after a little while out of the spotlight, alleged that the Gandhi family's trust in Amethi fraudulently bought land meant for a bicycle factory.
4. The Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam is set to induct a former member of the Congress into the BJP despite having called him "tainted" barely a month ago.
Punditry
1. With the Pakistani establishment likely to ramp up its attacks on India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have to learn to speak to the generals, writes Praveen Swami in the Indian Express.
2. The lack of real discussion on the audit report that allegedly reveals massive cost inflation by Delhi's electricity distribution companies is telling, writes Mukul Kesavan in the Telegraph.
3. If Bihar could make the government so reluctant to take difficult policy decisions, what happens when it is staring at polls in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, all set to take place before next May, asks AK Bhattacharyya in the Business Standard.
Don't Miss
Saikat Majumdar reflects on the government's attempts to turn into a moral police state.
On the surface a catchy metaphorical construction, it is actually a sad oxymoron. The police belongs to the domain of physical discipline and punishment carved by the state – the domain of hard power. The moral, by definition, belongs to the realm of ideology, of soft power. The job of the moral, of the indoctrination of citizens into the dominant value-system of the state – be it capitalism or the supremacy of Hindutva – is to be left to the family, to religion, to schools.
If state undertakings to rewrite history curricula and ban books are more ominous, they are also more natural. If you want to control the value system of the citizen, especially the adult, enfranchised citizen, you go for the textbooks, the schools, the media and publishing industry. All of which, in Althusser’s scientific taxonomy, make up the “Ideological State Apparatus.”
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