Times of Better Bharat

The report from Thanjavur is brief: the Sathaya Vizha of Raja Raja Chola was celebrated at the Big Temple ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Tiruchirapalli/sathaya-vizha-of-raja-raja-chola-celebrated-at-big-temple/article71611618.ece)). Most readers will pass over it. I would put it near the top of the day's civilisational news, because an observance of this kind is not a piece of nostalgia. It is a date being kept.

What a kept date proves

Continuity is usually argued in the language of sentiment, and that is precisely where it loses the argument. It is better argued as a record. Ask three plain questions of any claim to living heritage. Is there a place that can be visited and examined? Is there a practice still performed there? Is there an institution that carries the responsibility year after year, whether or not anyone is watching?

Where all three hold, continuity stops being a boast and becomes an observable fact about how a society spends its calendar. For Thanjavur, today's report settles the first two at the level of the everyday: a festival attached to a named ruler, held at a named temple, in a named town, was held again. That is what an unbroken tradition looks like from the outside — unspectacular, dated, repeated.

The unglamorous half of the case

The third question, custody, is where pride has to turn into work. Also in today's paper: the Madras High Court pulled up the Tamil Nadu HR&CE department for failing to act promptly against an erring executive officer in 2011, the bench observing that the sequence of events proved poor management by the department with no checks and balances ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/madras-high-court-pulls-up-tn-hrampce-department-for-failing-to-act-promptly-against-an-erring-eo-in-2011/article71615366.ece)). That is not a Thanjavur story. It is, however, the same subject. A temple or a monument is exactly as continuous as the institution that holds it. Conservation, cataloguing, honest accounts, and prompt action against those who fail are not the enemies of heritage; they are the only terms on which a claim to heritage survives scrutiny.

When continuity is alive, it looks like logistics

Consider the other end of the same instinct. For the Godavari Pushkarams in 2027 at Rajamahendravaram, 3,000 water kiosks and 32,000 taps are being planned for an estimated 80 lakh devotees a day ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/3000-water-kiosks-32000-taps-planned-for-godavari-pushkarams-2027-in-rajamahendravaram/article71614957.ece)). A river festival is being planned like infrastructure, which is what a living tradition actually demands. Elsewhere a Bihar teenager is running to the twelve Jyotirlingas after his mother's recovery — devotion taking the shape of a promise kept on foot ([NDTV](https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/bihar-teen-runs-to-visit-12-jyotirlingas-after-mother-recovers-12224861#publisher=newsstand)).

None of this requires the claim that the past was perfect. It was not; no century is. Pride that needs a flawless past is brittle. Pride that can audit its own inheritance is not.

Self-knowledge is a method, not a mood

If India is to read its own past on its own evidence, it needs the means to do so. The capacity exists: India published 2,28,174 scientific articles in 2023, on the World Bank's NSF-sourced series ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IP.JRN.ARTC.SC)). The investment does not yet match it — research and development spending stood at 0.6% of GDP in 2020, by UNESCO's count ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)). That is an argument for funding the reading of our own stones and manuscripts at the standard we fund everything else we take seriously.

A date was kept at Thanjavur. The lesson is not that we should feel warmly about it, but that keeping a date, keeping a record and keeping a building to the same standard is how a civilisation stays legible to itself.

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police is expanding its drone fleet, raising specialised Shaurya commando platoons, building underground shelters along the Line of Actual Control and putting a substantial modernisation budget behind high-altitude operations and training (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defence/news/drones-shaurya-commandos-and-underground-bunkers-how-itbp-is-preparing-for-china-along-lac/articleshow/135139167.cms). Read plainly, this is an admission that the Himalayan frontier has become an engineering and sensor problem. That is the correct reading, and the correct direction of travel.

The sentry is not the soldier

The timing matters. The ITBP chief, Shatrujeet Kapoor, has said face-offs with Chinese PLA troops are continuing along the Arunachal Pradesh border (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/enough-clean-chits-to-china-mallikarjun-kharge-congress-questions-pm-modi-over-security-trade-101792747103462.html). A force that is still being pushed, still being tested at close quarters, needs three things: to see further, to shelter better, and to respond faster. Drones, hardened habitat and dedicated assault platoons supply exactly those.

But a border-guarding police force is not a substitute for a corps. The temptation, when a paramilitary modernises visibly, is to let it absorb the political weight of the entire frontier while the Army's war-fighting requirement slips down the queue. That would be a category error. The ITBP holds the line in peace; the Army wins the contingency. Both need money, and the money must go to sustainment — spares, winter habitat, communications, mobility — not merely to photographs of new equipment.

The dependency that outranks the bunker

The more uncomfortable truth was put plainly by Shashi Tharoor, who noted that China has repeatedly shown it can turn the tap off on India's imports whenever it chooses (https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/shashi-tharoor-at-ndtv-world-summit-on-china-amid-itbp-chief-remark-row-need-predictable-ties-12224921#publisher=newsstand). A bunker protects a platoon from shellfire for a night. An import dependency ransoms a supply chain for a decade. India's manufacturing base is 13.5% of GDP and its research and development spending 0.6% of GDP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS). Those two numbers, not the depth of a shelter, will decide how much strategic autonomy Delhi actually possesses in 2040.

Argue about capability, not loyalty

The political row that followed the ITBP chief's remark — with the Congress demanding answers on "clean chits to China" — is a legitimate question wrapped in a bad argument. It is entirely proper to interrogate the government's handling of the LAC. It is not proper to convert every factual briefing by a serving officer into a loyalty test. India spends 2.3% of GDP on defence (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS); whether that envelope is right for a two-front problem, and how it is split between men, machines and pensions, is a contested judgement with real trade-offs, not a question of patriotism.

The services themselves are moving: the Army's Land Warfare Doctrine 2026, released this week, draws on recent conflicts and reorients towards drones, AI and multi-domain operations (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defence/news/armys-land-warfare-doctrine-2026-released-by-rajnath-draws-lessons-from-recent-conflicts/articleshow/135141673.cms).

Deterrence in the Himalaya is built of three things: concrete, spectrum and factories. The bunkers are the cheapest of the three. They are a start, not a strategy.

A demand that is really a test

The call for an "Operation Manipur" — for the unconditional and simultaneous disarmament of every armed group in the state — is growing louder, NDTV reports ([NDTV](https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/call-for-operation-manipur-grows-louder-for-unconditional-simultaneous-disarmament-of-all-groups-12224406#publisher=newsstand)). Read that demand carefully and it turns out to be not factional at all. It asks the state to do the one thing a state must do: hold the monopoly on lawful force, and hold it for everyone.

Manipur BJP MLA Rajkumar Imo Singh stated the principle plainly: firm action against unlawful armed activities "must remain impartial and directed at those responsible, without discrimination on the basis of community, identity or affiliation". That sentence is the whole case, and it is the Constitution's case, not a party's. Equality before the law does not permit the state to sort weapons into patriotic and criminal by reading a surname, a locality or a place of worship.

Why simultaneity is not a detail

Sequential disarmament is not a compromise; it is a trap. Whoever is asked to lay down arms first is asked to trust that the others will follow and that the state will protect them in the interval. Where protection is doubted, no group moves first — each cites the other's arsenal as its reason, and the standoff renews itself. "Simultaneous" and "unconditional" are therefore design features, not slogans. The order of surrender is the whole politics of the matter.

And the state cannot demand disarmament it cannot back with protection: disarmament has to be paired with the policing of offences regardless of identity, and with a political process that gives grievances a lawful destination.

The even-handed test

A constitutional argument earns its credibility by cutting in both directions. The discipline of lawful method — no violence, no intimidation, no settlement of disputes by street strength — binds every actor. When a party accuses its rivals of taking to the street to force an outcome and of fomenting "anarchy" (The Hindu reports BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi levelling exactly that charge against the Congress and its allies, [The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/congress-allies-aim-to-create-anarchy-through-november-1-delhi-protest-bjp/article71615493.ece)), it invokes a genuine principle — and must then accept it everywhere. No grievance, however deeply felt, licenses private armed force; and no government, however secure, may use "law and order" as a synonym for silencing dissent. Both halves stand or neither does.

The measurable cost of not acting

This is not abstraction. The World Bank's rule-of-law score for India stands at -0.13 on its -2.5 to +2.5 scale, and political stability and absence of violence at -0.61 ([World Bank WGI](https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators)). The World Justice Project places India 86th of 143 with a score of 0.49, down seven places ([WJP Rule of Law Index](https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/downloads/WJPIndex2025.pdf)). National averages cannot convict any single state, but they are assembled from places where the law arrives unevenly — and where it arrives unevenly, it eventually arrives weakly for everyone.

What the Constitution asks

The demand deserves support precisely because it is a demand on the state and not on any community. Every armed group, whatever it claims to speak for, is an unconstitutional claimant to the thing only the Republic may hold. Disarm them all, at the same hour, under the same law, and protect equally those who comply. That is what fraternity requires — not one side's victory, but one standard.

The arrest answers the easiest question

On 17 October, according to police, an announcement went out at the Chor Bagan Durga Puja pandal that it was collapsing. Panic followed, then a stampede, and 19 people were crushed to death. A man said to have made that call has now been arrested ([Hindustan Times](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/an-announcement-panic-then-19-crushed-man-behind-kolkata-chorbagan-pandal-collapse-call-arrested-101792734731924.html)).

Read the police's own phrasing carefully: the announcement may have sparked the panic. Even at the moment of arrest, causation is a hypothesis, not a finding. That is not a technicality. It is the whole difference between a justice process and a press release.

Speech has a narrow limit, and this is it

If the cry was false, and it killed, the person who made it must answer. This is the least controversial restriction on expression there is, and no friend of free speech should flinch from it. A claim of imminent collapse in a packed crowd is not opinion and not dissent; it is an instrument, and instruments that kill are the law's business. Free speech is defended for everyone, which is exactly why it cannot be stretched into a licence to stampede a crowd.

But the principle cuts both ways, and this is where the file must not close. If words alone could kill nineteen people, the conditions in which those words landed were somebody's responsibility too. A crowd large enough to crush itself did not assemble by accident. The argument is not that blame should be spread thin to comfort anyone; it is that one standard should be applied to every party to the same night.

One rule, applied to all parties

So the same inquiry that asks whether the announcement was true, reckless and causal must ask three more questions of named institutions: what did whoever organised the pandal know about crowd flow and exits; what did the permission-granting authority actually verify before the crowd arrived; and what was the police's crowd-management plan for a gathering of that size. Published findings, not private assurances.

That is not a campaign against any festival, organiser or community. It is the ordinary application of the rule that public safety is a duty owed in advance, not a press note issued afterwards.

Custody is the reflex, not the remedy

The arrest will be televised; the inquiry will not. India's prison system already tells us what happens when custody substitutes for conclusion: 72.6% of prisoners are pre-trial detainees ([World Prison Brief, 2024](https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/india)). The state's most visible act is its least conclusive one. Our rule-of-law score sits at −0.13 on the World Bank's −2.5 to +2.5 scale ([WGI, 2025](https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators)) — a middling number that reflects, among other things, processes that begin loudly and end quietly.

The casualty figures we have learned to tolerate

We tolerate mass death with a shrug. India records 1,83,434 road deaths a year, more than any country on earth in absolute terms, from 4,80,583 reported crashes ([MoRTH, 2025](https://morth.nic.in/road-accident-in-india)). A polity that treats that as weather will treat a stampede as misfortune.

Information is safety infrastructure

A crowd that size needs one authoritative voice and a public address system that can correct a rumour in ninety seconds. Rumour flourishes where official information is absent or slow. Fast, plain, official communication at public events is a safety duty, not public relations.

Nineteen people did not come home. One arrest is a beginning only if the same file also records what else failed — the audit, the plan, the permission — and publishes it. One law for all means the standard does not stop at the loudest person in the crowd.

A date worth noting, not yet a milestone

Swarajya reports that Vikram Solar is set to begin made-in-India solar cell production at its 9 GW Tamil Nadu facility in December ([Swarajya](https://swarajyamag.com/infrastructure/vikram-solar-set-to-begin-made-in-india-solar-cell-production-at-9-gw-tamil-nadu-facility-in-december)). We should be careful about what kind of event this is. A plant commissioning is not a supply chain. But it is the right place to start, and for a reason that is often glossed over in the coverage of green energy.

Why the cell, and not the module

A module is, in large part, assembly — glass, frame, encapsulant, junction box, a laminate pressed and tested. The cell is the harder half: the process engineering, the doping and metallisation steps, the yield discipline, the metrology. A country that assembles modules has a factory. A country that makes cells has a capability. That distinction, rather than any single capacity number, is what a self-reliance argument should turn on.

The strategic case is not abstract. At the NDTV World Summit this week, Shashi Tharoor painted what the network described as a worrying picture of India's dependence on Chinese imports, noting that China has repeatedly shown it can turn the tap off whenever it wants ([NDTV](https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/shashi-tharoor-at-ndtv-world-summit-on-china-amid-itbp-chief-remark-row-12224921#publisher=newsstand)). One need not share his broader politics to see that the point lands hardest in exactly those sectors where we have been content to import the difficult component and celebrate the easy one.

The scale of what remains

Keep the numbers in view. Renewables were 24.1% of electricity generation in 2025 ([Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewables)), with solar generation at 196 TWh ([Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-consumption)). Manufacturing is 13.5% of GDP ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS)). And our research base remains thin: R&D spending of 0.6% of GDP and 259.3 researchers per million people ([World Bank/UNESCO](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)). One 9 GW line, however welcome, does not overturn any of that. My judgement — and it is a judgement — is that the announcement matters far less than the answer to one question: how much of the wafer, polysilicon and deposition equipment do we intend to make here by, say, 2035?

Four things that will decide whether December counts

Power and water at the fence. Industrial units at Chennai's SIPCOT parks have flagged frequent power cuts and interruptions in water supply ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/industries-in-chennais-sipcot-parks-flag-infrastructure-gaps/article71612678.ece)). A cell line runs continuously and punishes voltage sag with lost yield. Tamil Nadu should be signing park-level reliability contracts before it signs another investment memorandum.

Apprenticeship alongside formal education. The technicians who run a diffusion furnace are made on the floor, not in a lecture hall. Tie the line to district polytechnics and ITIs with a structured apprenticeship — not as a substitute for higher education, but as its working complement.

An upstream consortium. C-DOT's new 6G and AI centre at IIT BHU ([Swarajya](https://swarajyamag.com/tech/india-steps-up-indigenous-telecom-research-as-c-dot-establishes-6g-ai-centre-at-iit-bhu)) shows the template: a public laboratory sitting next to industry, working on the next stage before the current one is saturated. Photovoltaic materials deserve the same treatment.

Procurement that rewards cells, not just assembly. A domestic-content rule that can be satisfied by bolting together imported parts will be satisfied that way.

Self-reliance is a stock, not an announcement. December is a beginning; the reckoning is what the plant looks like in year five.

Fifty letters in five years, all of them about water bodies that Delhi is quietly losing. It would be easy to read that as a story about paperwork, or about the loneliness of civic conscience. It is neither. It is a story about what happens when a city's water has no body — no boundary, no owner, no offence.

The two registers that do not reconcile

The report on this five-year campaign records that Delhi has 1,045 water bodies in revenue records and 322 identified through satellite imagery, with demarcation incomplete (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/5-yrs-50-letters-a-battle-to-save-delhi-s-vanishing-water-bodies-101792750550152.html). Those two figures are not a rounding error between departments; they describe two different cities. My reading is that the gap between them is the whole story — it is what you get when no one has been made responsible for saying exactly where the water begins and ends.

A pond without a boundary is treated, in practice, as nobody's. Fill it, build on it, and there is no encroachment to prove because there is no line to cross. Fifty letters and one missing line on a map: the asymmetry is the argument.

The base is measurable

None of this is abstraction. India withdraws 66.5% of its available freshwater (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWST.ZS) and loses 1,25,678 hectares of tree cover a year (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss). Forest cover stands at 24.4% of land area (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS), and Delhi remains the world's most polluted capital at 82.2 µg/m³ (https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-report). A civilisation's ecological base is not a sentiment; it can be counted.

And yes, India's climate-equity case is real and legitimate — per-capita emissions of 2.17 tonnes (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.GHG.CO2.PC.CE.AR5) make the point that the loudest sermons come from those who emitted first, an argument made at the Berlin Global Dialogue (https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/whos-responsible-for-mess-piyush-goyal-slams-europe-over-carbon-emissions-berlin-global-dialogue-2026-12224721#publisher=newsstand). But equity is a claim on the world's conscience, not a licence at home. The atmosphere may be a negotiation; a pond is a duty.

The inward half

The interesting thing about those fifty letters is their discipline. No theatre, no victimhood — just the same person, returning to the same unfinished task. That is what well-being looks like as a practical matter rather than a belief: not a mood, but a habit of responsibility. The dharmic idea of restraint — contentment read not as passivity but as not taking what is not ours to take, including a tank — is offered here as an ethic, not as a scientific claim. It is the sort of thing one tests in one's own life.

Reverence is not in short supply in this country. It simply needs redirecting: the Godavari Pushkarams in 2027 will raise 3,000 water kiosks and 32,000 taps for an estimated 80 lakh devotees a day (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/3000-water-kiosks-32000-taps-planned-for-godavari-pushkarams-2027-in-rajamahendravaram/article71614957.ece). The same water that vanishes in one season arrives as flood in another, with the IMD projecting heavy rainfall on the Andhra and Odisha coast between 27 and 29 October (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/cyclone-arnab-cyclonic-storm-bay-of-bengal-few-days-rain-alert-andhra-pradesh-odisha-cyclone-landfall-imd-101792750274251.html). And when habitat contracts, the bill is presented at the forest gate, as it was when residents besieged the Hasanur forest office over leopard attacks (https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Coimbatore/residents-lay-siege-to-hasanur-forest-office-over-leopard-attacks/article71615434.ece).

Demarcate the water bodies first. Everything else — the trees, the aquifers, the fifty letters — becomes defensible once there is a line to defend.