The Caravan Magazine

07/06/2026

As Golwarkar's successor, Madhukar Dattatreya Deoras grasped that the RSS could not afford to remain the face of caste orthodoxy while a militant Dalit movement was seeping into the political consciousness of Maharashtra. Deoras began publicly disassociating himself from his predecessor’s proclamations on caste. While he never admitted to the Dalit Panthers’s influence, the quickness with which he made his new position public suggested otherwise.

Dhirendra K Jha reports how the Dalit Panthers forced the RSS into changing its language on caste: https://caravanmagazine.in/history/how-the-dalit-panthers-forced-the-rss-into-changing-its-language-on-caste

07/06/2026

Archives | The Akal Takht in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar was shattered during Operation Bluestar, and is pictured here on 7 June 1984. The intensity of the violence that broke out in Punjab subsequent to Operation Bluestar far exceeded anything that had preceded it.

The response from fundamentalists in the diaspora is an atavistic desire to restore the preeminent role of the Akal Takht jathedar in the community. Despite being born and brought up in Western democracies, which they show no signs of abandoning, they seem to have no feel for how democratic institutions and parties actually should work.

A sense of victimhood nurtured and fed through a selective view of history is, in the end, a handicap for the community that nurtures it. It is this imagination that feels something has been gained in the long cycle from Bhindranwale to Valtoha to Amritpal. If nothing changes, as seems likely, given such leaders, twenty years from now Tarn Taran will be voting out an Amritpal acolyte for the next candidate who comes dressed in fresh panthic credentials, once again endorsed by loud cheers from the fundamentalists in the diaspora.

How the chimera of Khalistan animates Hindu and Sikh fundamentalism, by
Hartosh Singh Bal: https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/chimera-khalistan-animates-hindu-sikh-fundamentalism

The new revival of Khalistan bears an uncanny similarity to the events of the early 1980s.

07/06/2026

On 12 June 2025, 239 passengers and crew died, with another 19 on the ground when the Air India 171 crashed into a hostel block of BJ Medical College, less than two kilometres from Ahmedabad’s airport, 32 seconds after taking off.

The aviation establishment seemed to coalesce early on an answer as to why did it happen. Two days before the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, an agency overseen by India’s ministry of civil aviation, was due to submit its preliminary report, the Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive. It was titled “Air India Probe Puts Early Focus on Pilots’ Actions and Plane’s Fuel Switches.” Citing “people familiar with U.S. officials’ early assessments,” the article said that the preliminary investigation suggested the pilot had manually cut off the switches sending fuel to the engine.

But the report had an unusual way of establishing this. On 12 July, the day of the deadline, the AAIB released its report at 1 am—no press conference, no technical briefing, no investigators taking questions. Just a 15-page unsigned, undated, document not directly blaming the pilot but suggesting, with cherry-picked data, that he had cut the fuel to the engines.

Read the entire report by Rachel Chitra: https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/air-india-crash-aaib-boeing-pilot

07/06/2026

Boeing’s 787 airplanes are assembled at the company's manufacturing plant in Everett, Washington, in May 2008. The 787’s earliest production block, nicknamed the “terrible teens,” consisted of heavily overweight, out-of-tolerance airframes that sat for years in rework because they did not meet delivery standards.

Read how Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster is being covered up, in our latest issue: https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/air-india-crash-aaib-boeing-pilot

07/06/2026

Vijay belongs to this new era. Reels, memes, viral clips and short-form political messaging, combined with his charisma and cinematic familiarity, helped create what many described as an “algorithm-driven election.” Young voters formed the core of Vijay’s support base, while the established parties continued to rely largely on conventional campaign methods. Even so, his first electoral victory in a state long dominated alternately by two Dravidian giants has come as a shock.

Read the entire essay: https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/vijay-victory-tamil-nadu

07/06/2026

Archives | Surya Kant faces allegations of grave misconduct. In 2012, a real-estate agent accused the judge of having participated in illegal property dealings involving undervaluation and cash transactions worth several crores. In 2017, a prisoner in Punjab filed a complaint listing eight cases heard by Kant, and alleged that the judge had accepted bribes to grant bail in these.

Read the entire report by Atul Dev: https://caravanmagazine.in/law/surya-kant-himachal-pradesh-chief-justice-sc-elevation-allegation-corruption-tax-evasion

06/06/2026

A former Dalit Panther leader, Texas Gaikwad, wrote a Marathi play, Amhi Deshache Marekari—we are killing the nation—that brought the splinter Panther groups face to face with the RSS in several parts of Maharashtra.

Written in 1980, it showed the RSS as destroying the country by spreading lies in society and depicted its members as characterless people who collected black money. “We used to carry images of Golwalkar and lathi-wielding swayamsevaks in posters designed for the play,” Texas said.

Dhirendra K Jha reports: https://caravanmagazine.in/history/how-the-dalit-panthers-forced-the-rss-into-changing-its-language-on-caste

05/06/2026

Tamil cinema has produced political leaders before, but Vijay’s rise is very different from those of MG Ramachandran, M Karunanidhi or J Jayalalithaa. Those leaders grew through party systems, public speeches and ideological movements. How did the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, a newly formed party with no conventional political lineage, manage to break the Dravidian duopoly of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam?

The answer lies partly with social media.

Read the entire essay here: https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/vijay-victory-tamil-nadu

05/06/2026

The Dalit Panthers had, in barely a year since its formation, made the RSS the primary symbol of Brahminical oppression in Maharashtra. Its members had burned the Bhagwad Gita, a Hindu religious text highly venerated by the RSS, and one that Ambedkar had said provided a defence of the chaturvarnya. They had chased a shankaracharya—head of a monastic order—out of his own public engagements about caste. They had turned Dalit fury into an organised, confrontational force.

Read the entire report on how the Dalit Panthers forced the RSS into changing its language on caste, in our latest issue: https://caravanmagazine.in/history/how-the-dalit-panthers-forced-the-rss-into-changing-its-language-on-caste

05/06/2026

How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines | The Caravan Conversations Ep1

In this episode of The Caravan Conversations, neuroscientist Gaurav Suri sits down with our executive editor Hartosh Singh Bal, his co-author, from nearly two decades ago on the mathematical novel A Certain Ambiguity, for a conversation about what actually happens when we arrive at a decision.

Watch the full episode here:

In this episode of The Caravan Conversations, neuroscientist Gaurav Suri sits down with our executive editor Hartosh Singh Bal, his co-author, from nearly tw...