Times of Better Bharat

The news, plainly

The historic Hasanamba temple in Hassan has opened its doors for its annual period of darshan, as The Hindu reports (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/historic-hasanamba-temple-opened-in-hassan/article71639877.ece). The same day brings a companion report: that "miracle" claims have resurfaced as the temple opens (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/hasanamba-miracle-claims-resurface-as-temple-opens/article71639881.ece).

This column takes no position on those claims. It notes only what they are — claims, reported as claims, unverified — and that the case for India's civilisational depth does not need them, and is weakened when it leans on them.

Continuity is the harder wonder

Here is a claim that can be defended. A shrine that opens on a fixed annual rhythm, that draws a town back to it generation after generation, and that has kept that rhythm across centuries, is evidence of an institution functioning continuously. Not a spectacular event: a repeated one.

That repetition is the thing worth studying. Ritual calendars, hereditary service, the transmission of practice and the unbroken attachment of a locality to a place — these are the ordinary mechanisms by which a civilisation demonstrates it never stopped. A civilisation's continuity is better proved by the survival of a schedule than by the suspension of a law of nature. This is a judgement, and I offer it as one.

The test a reader can apply

An enthusiast who reasons like an engineer does not ask to be believed; he asks to be checked. So: what inscriptions does the temple carry, and have they been read and published? What are its architectural phases, and has anyone drawn them to scale? What do temple and revenue records show about how the annual opening was administered a century ago? Are photographs, oral accounts and archival material being collected before the generation that holds them in memory is gone?

None of these questions requires a leap of faith. All of them are answerable, and every answer thickens the record. Where documentation is underway, the heritage case compounds annually. Where it is not, we are left with wonder alone — and wonder is a poor foundation for a claim we intend to defend in public argument for the next fifty years. The natural companion of an annual opening is a serious documentation programme: epigraphy, measured drawings, digitised archives, accessible to scholars and sceptics alike.

Pride that survives scrutiny

Heritage in India is plural. The calendar logic that brings a town back to the Hasanamba temple is kin to the logic that fills shrines, mosques, churches, dargahs and gurdwaras across the country. Pride in one is not a claim against another, and a civilisation confident of its depth has no reason to make it one.

There is a practical dividend too. The World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index places India 31st of 110, up eight places on its recalculated 2024 position (https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Travel_and_Tourism_Development_Index_2026.pdf), and UN Tourism data record 98,24,000 international arrivals in 2024 (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-tourist-arrivals). Heritage is an economic asset as well as a spiritual one. But an asset is only worth what the record supports.

The doors will close again in a few days. What will remain, for the next opening and the one after, is what we thought to write down, photograph and publish. A confident nation keeps the ledger.

What was actually offered

At the 13th ADMM-Plus in Cebu, the Defence Minister said India was ready to share its "battle-tested" counter-terrorism expertise with ASEAN partners — through joint exercises, capacity-building programmes and intelligence sharing — and proposed a dedicated defence "Youth Bridge" with ASEAN countries (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-ready-to-share-battle-tested-counter-terrorism-expertise-with-asean-partners-rajnath/article71640582.ece).

This is the right kind of offer, and for an unglamorous reason. It is one of the few things India can supply in the Indo-Pacific that a richer competitor cannot simply outspend, because it is not a product. It is the residue of a long and costly domestic experience. The Global Terrorism Index 2026 places India 13th of 163 countries, with a score of 6.43, slipping a place on the year (https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Global-Terrorism-Index-2026-Report.pdf). Read coldly, that ranking is an inventory of what India has absorbed — and, therefore, of what its police, intelligence services and coastal-security machinery have learned about financial trails, urban counter-terror command and the unglamorous business of investigation.

Contrast the hardware ledger. India's arms imports stood at 2.86 billion SIPRI trend-indicator value in 2025 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.MPRT.KD); military expenditure at 2.3% of GDP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS). We are a buyer, not a vendor. Doctrine and training, not platforms, are where Indian credibility in Southeast Asia actually rests.

Where the offer meets the wall

Two obstacles. First, ADMM-Plus is a consensus body, and its members hedge — that is the nature of the institution, not a criticism of any of them. Second, atmospherics are not our strong suit: the Global Soft Power Index 2026 puts India 32nd of 193 on a score of 48, down two places (https://static.brandirectory.com/reports/brand-finance-soft-power-indexnation-brands-2026-digital.pdf). A "Youth Bridge" is a pleasant idea; drills and protocols are a durable one.

Intelligence sharing is simultaneously the most valuable and the hardest item on the list. No service shares sources and methods on the strength of a declaration. This is a judgement, not a finding, but the test is concrete: a standing counter-terror working group with agreed handling protocols, a fixed multinational exercise calendar, and a funded capacity-building line in the defence budget. India already fields 194 diplomatic posts, ranking 11th of 66 on the Lowy Global Diplomacy Index (https://globaldiplomacyindex.lowyinstitute.org/downloads/GDI_Key_Findings.pdf); the network exists. Whether it is staffed for security cooperation is a choice, not a constraint.

The connection that matters most

The enablers of counter-terrorism are the enablers of everything else: maritime domain awareness, secure communications, surveillance, logistics, information-sharing habits between agencies that have never needed to talk before. Those same assets are what a two-front contingency — Pakistan's terror economy on one flank, a Chinese navy that treats the Indian Ocean as a through-route on the other — demands of us. India is already a net security provider by habit: 4,278 uniformed personnel on UN peacekeeping, third of 120 contributors (https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/02_country_ranking_95_february_2026.pdf). The Cebu offer extends an established role rather than inventing a new one.

So support it — but as an argument with conditions, not a slogan. Money, protocols, presence. Otherwise "battle-tested expertise" is a phrase in a communiqué, and the sea lanes will not be patrolled by a phrase.

The report is short and it is unbearable. Akilan, a Class XI student in Coimbatore, ended his life, and the reporting links the death to caste-based harassment involving classmates and a teacher ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/videos/shows/coimbatore-students-death-how-caste-identity-continues-to-divide-tns-schoolchildren-focus-tamil-nadu/article71641304.ece)). We do not know everything; a school corridor is not a courtroom, and this column will not pretend to a verdict. But neither is this an anecdote to be mourned and filed away. It is a diagnostic. The school is the first institution the republic places in a child's path. If caste can walk through that gate and the child cannot walk out from under it, then for that child equality before the law is a promise kept only on paper.

The adult in the room

Note the detail the report supplies: the harassment is said to have involved a teacher. Children are not born with a doctrine of hierarchy, and they do not invent one at fifteen. They learn it — and they learn it fastest from adults who either teach it or permit it and call the permitting neutral. When the person paid to protect a child is placed among those who demean him, the failure is not a discipline problem to be settled with a transfer. It is institutional. A school that cannot guarantee a child's dignity cannot honestly claim to be educating him.

The law has already spoken

The Constitution did not leave this to sentiment or to the good manners of teachers. Article 17 abolishes untouchability. Article 15 makes caste an impermissible ground of State action, and the equality clauses bind every institution that the State funds or recognises. The gap between those words and the classroom is the honest measure of how deep our democracy actually reaches. The same gap is visible in the aggregate: inequality cuts India's human development score by 30.7 per cent, the steepest such discount among its neighbours ([UNDP via Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index)). That discount is not weather. It is hierarchy, levied on children.

Not one State's problem

The report's own framing — that despite decades of social reform, caste prejudice continues to divide students in Tamil Nadu — should not be read as an indictment of a region. The warning is that reform can become a story we tell about ourselves while the corridor stays exactly as it was. That warning must be applied even-handedly, and this is the test of whether our anti-caste argument is a principle or a convenience: a republic that is loud about hierarchy in one place and silent about it in another is not being principled, it is being selective. Hierarchy has many houses, including the ones we do not like to describe.

What a school owes

Three things, none of them dramatic. First, an inquiry that fixes accountability at the level of the institution, not merely at the level of the children who copied what they were shown. Second, a standing and usable grievance mechanism in schools, so that a student's complaint is a right exercised rather than a risk taken. Third, teaching that treats caste as a subject of reason and history rather than a fact of nature — and a teaching profession held to that same standard.

This much is a judgement, but it is the only one available: fraternity is not a decorative word in the Preamble. Liberty and equality survive only where citizens accept one another as equals, and that acceptance is learned young or not at all. A child taught otherwise in school will not be given it back by a Constitution later.

Credit, then the harder question

The Telangana Cyber Security Bureau has warned that a fake message promising a ₹8,000 Diwali benefit is circulating on WhatsApp ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/fake-8000-diwali-benefit-message-circulating-on-whatsapp-warns-tgcsb/article71640642.ece)). A public authority telling citizens plainly that a widely-shared claim is false is doing exactly what it should. The Bureau deserves the credit, and the alert deserves a wide read.

But a warning is a fire alarm raised after the fire. It is necessary and insufficient. Two duties sit behind it, and neither is discharged by a press note.

First duty: make the truth easy to find

A citizen who receives a claim of ₹8,000 should be able to settle it in under a minute — one official page, one scheme, updated, in the language he actually reads. The reason is arithmetic. Around 70% of Indians use the internet (World Bank/ITU, 2025: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS), there are 79.4 mobile subscriptions per 100 people (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2), and 89% of adults hold a bank account (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FX.OWN.TOTL.ZS). India has the seventh-cheapest mobile data in the world at US$0.16 per gigabyte, seventh of 237 markets (Cable.co.uk, 2023: https://bestbroadbanddeals.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/). A forward costs nothing and reaches everyone.

That is not an argument for restricting the pipe. It is an argument for filling it with better material. Rumour thrives where the official record is scattered, undated or buried; it withers where a single authoritative page answers the obvious question.

Second duty: the same speed for every rumour

Article 14 does not stop at the courtroom door; it governs administration, including a cyber police wing. If a fake scheme message is chased briskly this week, the same briskness must apply to the next one — whichever government's scheme is being spoofed, whichever party holds the state or the Centre. Selective alertness teaches citizens that verification is politics by another name, and that lesson is far more corrosive than any single scam.

The free-speech point

The wrong lesson from a fraud is 'forward nothing'. The right one is 'check, then forward'. Article 19(1)(a) protects the reader and the passer-on, not only the publisher. The people to pursue are the fabricators — those who build the fake link, harvest the data, take the money. Turning an alarmed relative in a family group into the accused does not produce a well-informed public; it produces a silent one, which suits nobody except the next fabricator.

Article 51A's fundamental duty to develop a scientific temper is quoted at schoolchildren. It belongs equally to the state's own communication: vague announcements and unattributed benefits are the raw material of rumour, and precise ones are the antidote.

The judgement

My reading is that a warning plus a verifiable official record is the whole remedy, and that this alert is a good template only if it is followed by prosecutions of the actual fabricators and by benefit information a citizen can check in one place. An alert that ends in suspicion of citizens rather than of fraudsters will leave the next fake working just as well.

The report from Hingoli is small, specific, and therefore worth reading slowly. Some 80 to 100 women — landless workers — borrowed through self-help groups from a micro-finance firm based in neighbouring Washim district, and have pasted notices of intended house sale on their doors. A Krantikari Shetkari Sanghatana functionary says they were allegedly facing harassment despite having repaid at least 70 per cent of what they owed ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/maharashtra/landless-workers-in-hingoli-paste-house-sale-notices-on-doors-amid-loan-repayment-pressure/article71641179.ece)). These are allegations, and the firm has not been heard in the report. But the shape of the thing is familiar enough to reason about.

A debt that cannot repay itself

The operative word is landless. A loan written against a coming harvest can be rescheduled, because the harvest exists to be rescheduled against. A loan written against a wage, with a house as the only asset behind it, has nothing to roll into. When a family pastes a sale notice on its own door, it is not sending a market signal; it is complying with a collection calendar. That four-fifths of the sum had already come back, on the account given, suggests the pressure is being generated by the method of recovery rather than by the size of the principal. My judgement, not a finding: a credit system that cannot distinguish between a borrower in arrears and a borrower being squeezed has stopped being a credit system and become a squeeze.

What credit is actually for

Credit has two uses. It can smooth consumption across a bad month, or it can build an asset that earns. Rural lending in India has drifted steadily towards the first while talking as though it were doing the second. The productivity numbers explain the drift. Farm output per worker stands at about US$2,159 in constant 2015 dollars ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.AGR.EMPL.KD)) — a base too thin to service a loan out of savings, which is why the loan ends up serviced out of the house.

The prescription is not more credit. It is credit with a named asset inside it: a milch animal with a buyer for the milk, an irrigation pump with a repair man in the block, a sewing machine with an order book, a poultry shed with a feed supplier. Interest subvention should follow the asset being insured and the buyer being identified before disbursement. Self-help groups should graduate into block-level federations that keep their own books and lend from their own balance sheet, so that the recovery decision sits with neighbours who know the household rather than with a collection agent in the next district. And recovery conduct should be enforced by the lender's own regulator, not left to a farmers' organisation to publicise.

The plumbing is not the problem

It is worth remembering how much of the machinery already exists. Some 89 per cent of adults hold a bank account ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FX.OWN.TOTL.ZS)), and India processes more real-time payments than any tracked market — 129 billion in a year ([ACI Worldwide](https://www.aciworldwide.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2024-Prime-Time-for-Real-Time-Report.pdf)). Money moves beautifully. Moving money is not the same as creating it. On the same day as this report, the Reserve Bank set the half-yearly coupon on the FRB 2034 at 7.26 per cent ([RBI](https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_PressReleaseDisplay.aspx?prid=63883)) — a reminder of how confidently household savings are corralled into sovereign paper and gold while the working capital of a district waits for a lender from the next district.

The long build

None of this is solved by earnestness. It is solved by research and by skills. Public R&D spending sits at 0.6 per cent of GDP with 259 researchers per million people ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.SD)). Applied, district-level work on cold chains, agri-processing and small manufacture — and apprenticeship running alongside formal schooling rather than instead of it — is the slow, unglamorous route to a wage that can carry a loan. A republic should be judged by whether a woman who has repaid seven-tenths of her debt can sleep in her own house.

A tigress has left Buxa reserve — the reserve she was herself moved to, not long ago, from Bihar — and walked into Assam ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tigress-from-buxa-reserve-recently-relocated-from-bihar-enters-assam/article71639494.ece)). The report is two lines of news. The fact underneath it is larger: in the time it took one animal to cross a few administrative boundaries, she demonstrated the difference between the map we govern by and the map she lives on.

A reserve is not a habitat

A reserve is a legal idea with a boundary drawn around it. A habitat is a continuous arrangement of water, prey, cover and quiet, and it does not care where the district line falls. We are meticulous about the first and careless with the second. Forest cover stands at 24.4% of India's land area (World Bank / FAO, 2024, [link](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS)) while tree cover loss runs at roughly 1,25,678 hectares a year (Global Forest Watch via Our World in Data, 2024, [link](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss)). A quarter of the country under trees, with a fresh hole cut in it every year, does not describe a habitat. It describes an archipelago — and an archipelago is where large animals go to become small populations.

The honesty of a truck

Moving a tiger is a confession. It concedes that the corridor failed, and that we are doing by lorry what the animal should have done on foot. That this tigress then kept walking is the more interesting half of the story: it suggests she found something usable out there, and it reminds us that a relocation is a repair, not a cure. Release an animal into a reserve whose surroundings cannot receive her, and the reserve becomes a waiting room.

The human half of the habitat

Every corridor runs through somebody's field, past somebody's school, along somebody's road. It is a comfortable thing for those of us in cities to speak of coexistence, because the cost of it is not paid here. My argument — and it is a judgement, not a measurement — is that conservation which demands everything of the forest edge and nothing of the metropolis is not conservation at all; it is outsourcing. The tolerance of a farming household is a piece of national ecological infrastructure, as real as a boundary wall, and should be recognised and recompensed as such.

Balance as a discipline

The older Indian vocabulary for this is not 'environmental management' but balance — the habit of taking less than you might, so that the whole arrangement stays standing. That is dharma in its plain, everyday sense: not a belief to profess, but a limit to keep. It is also, I would suggest, the same discipline that inner well-being asks of a person. A mind that grabs at everything is not unlike a landscape stripped past its renewal. Both recover by moderation, and neither by slogan.

The physical ledger is not encouraging. India withdraws 66.5% of its available freshwater (FAO via World Bank, 2022, [link](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWST.ZS)); the Environmental Performance Index places it 176th of 177, a ranking that is [CONTESTED] and whose methodology the government has disputed, even as the index's own ten-year series shows an improvement of +7.47 ([link](https://epi.yale.edu/)).

None of this is the tigress's problem. She is not a trespasser. She is reading the land as it actually is, and finding it still — just — legible. Our task is not to return her to the file in which she is recorded, but to keep that reading possible: corridors kept open, water kept in the ground, and a country willing to pay for the quiet places it claims to love.