Until a decade ago, access to government services was universal, and citizenship was never an issue. Today, however, Indians are being excluded from voting rights, welfare benefits and even domicile rights in an arbitrary manner.

A ninety-four-year-old man in Chandigarh asks his driver to take him to Sargodha, near Lahore. The driver is stumped. He tries to explain to the old man that this is not possible. They can’t just casually drive into another country. The old man will have none of it. He is old and frail, but no less a tyrant for that. At the border, the BSF officer is amused, but equally at a loss. He has no idea how to bring a senile, delusional man stuck in the past back into the present.

On June 13, Karnataka’s home minister Priyank Kharge sent a letter to RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat asking him to reveal its ‘legal status, registration, office bearers, funding, expenditure, taxation and permissions for public activities.’  This drew two bizarre responses. One was from Bhagwat himself, who even while saying that he doesn’t need to respond to the letter, declared that "Hindu Dharma is not registered. Many things are not registered,” and that the government knows that the Sangh exists.

THE US-Israel war against Iran is a continuation of a war that the US and Israel have launched in West Asia against any country or organised resistance to their neo-colonial policies. However, Iran’s resistance, along with Hezbollah’s ability to fight Israel’s “expansion” into Lebanon, has created a new dynamic in the region for the first time. It has not only challenged US global hegemony but also shown that smaller military powers can resist much larger ones through asymmetric warfare.

THE Iran–US Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) emerged not from reconciliation, but from exhaustion and strategic failure by the United States and its allies. It was the product of a war that had reached its political limits. Washington and Tel Aviv presented their illegal war of aggression as a necessary response to Iran’s nuclear energy programme, missile capabilities, and regional alliances.