A week under scanner: Indian elections and far-right in EU elections
Check out for some cool readings, essays and links for this week.
Dear Reader,
I hope you’ve been well!
Here is a short post for this week. At the outset, I haven’t gotten myself to writing/reading anything outside of my PhD project this week. And I am sure this will continue for the next few months—as I figure things out.
Lately, I have learned that there are always new ways and new things to think of in a PhD. While it is challenging to seep yourself into a barrage of articles on a topic, it is also exciting to think of how you coherently make sense of them in your head—and later on, on paper.
Besides this, the parliamentary election results in India are promising, despite my initial pessimism emanating from a serious reading of exit polls (that predicted the ruling BJP to win over 400 seats). It is a lesson that one shouldn’t take exit polls too seriously when the results are announced days into the exit poll predictions.
Apart from the exit poll debacle (all of them got the result wrong this time!), there is a sense in India that the overarching persona of Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, is not all that impenetrable and can easily be defeated with a coalition of multiple forces. There is much more to unpack here, but several have written brilliantly on the election results. I will link a few good essays below.
In France and elsewhere in Europe, there has been a significant rise in the number of far-right and other right-wing parties. In the EU Parliamentary elections, Marine Le Pen’s Nationalist Rally Party (which won about twice as Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party) of France and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) have significantly made inroads.
After losing significant seats to Le Pen’s party in the recent EU elections, Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly and call for snap polls in France. Now, it is interesting to see what happens here.
Apart from these things, I have not thought of anything new in the last week. I think it is important to admit that good ideas take time. But, as usual, this week I wrote a blog on Arjun Appadorai’s 1993 essay: “Number in the Colonial Imagination”.
In colonial India, the census became a paramount driver of understanding the Indian society through its occupations, class, caste, and religions. This created what David Ludden calls “orientalist empiricism”—a “hunt for information” and using numbers and numerical data to archive this information. In practice, these numerical imperatives were thought to help embark on “social control” or—in best cases, even reform colonies.
This is the link to read this essay on numbers and colonial imagination.
Here are some other articles you may like:
Read this article on the latest CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: clearing misconceptions about the post-poll survey
Check this FT essay on why Emmanuel Macron went all in against Marine Le Pen and decided to
Watch this Samdish Bhatia’s Unfiltered video on his travel to a village in Bihar, where he speaks with Deshpremi (translated: Patriot), a destitute—wholly malnourished—youngster, who has to beg to eat his second meal in a day. It is heart-wrenching!
Read this FT story on Indian elections in charts.
It is all for this week.
Perhaps, for the next week, I get more time to think and write something. However, the informal nature of this newsletter will continue to persist, given I also write a blog alongside.
With my warm wishes,
Adarsh.