The Citizenship Amendment Bill and the pan-Indian National Register of Citizens mark a foundational shift in the Indian conception of citizenship, providing paths to citizenship for some and driving others on to paths to statelessness.

The 2019 Nobel laureates in Economics should use their new stature to call for a moratorium on experiments done on vulnerable populations since poor ethical standards often mark the design and conduct of Randomised Control Trials on these groups.

The drive to re-introduce the Citizens Amendment Bill and the plan to prepare a nation-wide National Register of Citizens are both part of a larger strategy to re-engineer the India of plurality and diversity into a Hindu rashtra.

Inbreeding and nepotism have for long been features of universities. The favoured students go from being postgraduates to doctorates and then become lecturers, all within the same university. This has naturally had a negative impact on academic culture.

India’s political experiment over seven decades had shown that federalism can accommodate diverse policies for diverse identities and thus strengthen democracy in a plural society. That has now been set aside by the Government of India’s actions in Kashmir.

In West Bengal, the symbolic violence of caste is more intense than physical violence. A university teacher describes the everyday exclusionary experiences of adivasis in education spaces and the operation of caste-based glass-ceilings when they do find jobs.

Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life — politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a player of infinite games with a vision of life as play.