The Caravan Magazine

Why the Congress keeps losing elections

FACE PALM MANJUSHA KUMARI, a resident of Gaya district, began working for the Bihar government’s Jeevika mission in 2013. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had introduced the scheme in 2007— with funding from the World Bank and, later, the National Rural...

Everybody’s Guy

Rajdeep Sardesai is one of the most trusted voices in Indian journalism. Having started out at the Times of India, nearly four decades ago, he went on to become an undisputed star of cable news, working as an anchor and editor at NDTV, CNN-IBN and...

Musical Chairs

Nitish Kumar’s political career has been characterised by frequent defections, depending on which way the political winds were blowing. In the 1990s, he broke with Lalu Prasad Yadav, an ally since his days in student politics, and joined hands with the...

Blood on the Tracks

Track maintainers constitute the largest section of the Indian Railways workforce, but their frequent deaths go largely unseen and unreported. Why are they dying in such numbers? Over the past two decades, while the rail network has expanded and trains...

Plan of Inaction

In August 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dissolved the Planning Commission and replaced it with a think tank: the NITI Aayog. The Planning Commission was a time-honoured body—since Independence, it had been responsible for equitably planning...

The increasing clout of Thakurs in Uttar Pradesh

The RSS Does Not Exist

On 19 February 2025, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh inaugurated its new headquarters in the capital. Keshav Kunj is the perfect metaphor for what the RSS is today: immense in scale and ambition, but built to evade scrutiny. Through interviews with...

Vermillion Lines

Operation Sindoor was meant to dispense what Prime Minister Narendra Modi called “a new form of justice” after the Pahalgam attack. However, the operation and its aftermath exposed the dangerous gap between Modi’s bombast and India’s strategic...

Adani’s Millions in Mauritius

In 2018, while investigating the AgustaWestland case, the ED and the CBI discovered a web of Mauritian companies that had long participated in moving the spoils from 15 corrupt defence deals that cost the Indian exchequer an estimated ₹ 1.8 trillion....

Wild Dreams

Over the past three years, the Narendra Modi government has imported 20 African cheetahs. Many of them have been moving, with their cubs, out of the area earmarked for them. After two cubs died merely two days after birth in November 2024, the number...

The Balakot Misdirection

The Balakot operation and its aftermath marked the first time since the 1971 India–Pakistan War that both countries conducted airstrikes on each other’s territory. As with all their other wars, they have stuck to radically different narratives of what...

Drive to Survive

Since he first took office, three decades ago, Chandrababu Naidu has projected himself as the CEO, rather than chief minister, of Andhra Pradesh, centralising the administration, pushing through massive infrastructure projects and implementing...

Unreliable News

Since Mukesh Ambani took over Network18, the Reliance megaphone has been amplified by the media conglomerate’s 21 television news channels in 14 languages—reaching an estimated 400 million viewers—four news websites, three magazines, 18 entertainment...

A final convertion with GN Saibaba

Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba was a scholar and human-rights activist who taught English literature at the University of Delhi. Polio contracted as a child had left Saibaba disabled below the waist. In 2014, he was arrested and accused of having links to...

Lowering the Bar

In narratives about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its vision to reshape India, the role of its lawyers and their experiments within the courts has been overlooked. In 1992, RSS intellectual Dattopant Thengadi established the Akhil Bharatiya...

Choking to Death

Workers in industries such as mining, quarrying, construction, glass are exposed to high quantities of active silica dust, and often contract a fatal and incurable lung disease called silicosis. It causes the formation of fibrous nodules in the lungs,...

The Godmother

Amritananadamayi’s claim to fame is not her oratory or the stories of her miracles—though there are quite a few of those. Her signature act is the embrace that she offers to her devotees, a ritual that earned her the moniker “the hugging saint.” Thanks...