India's future may depend upon BJP reconciling its absolutist approach

Can the 2020 BJP leadership can, at this late stage, manage to reconcile its absolutist, majoritarian, Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan approach with the coalition dharma of its Vajpayee-era predecessors

Most commentators have viewed the farmers’ unrest that centres on Punjab as purely in terms of a reaction to the changes to agricultural policy that the government has carried out since it passed three Ordinances on the subject over the summer. And this is certainly one way of looking at it. The fact that the protests are driven by farmers from Punjab, alongside participation from neighbouring areas, can be interpreted in terms of the experience that these are the parts of the country that benefit most from the current food subsidy and procurement mechanism.

Yet there is another way of