The foreign hand, again

Conspiratorial thinking leads to tyranny. It means you imagine connections between disparate groups of dissenters, and thereby elevate in your mind their danger to the state

In retrospect, we might look at the first weeks of 2021 as a watershed in India’s slide away from constitutional values. Such moments have arrived in many countries across the world that have elected populist governments over the past decades; for the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, it came in 2013 over protests in Istanbul against the construction of replica military barracks in a historic park, snowballing into demands for Mr Erdogan’s resignation. By the end of that year, Turkey’s ruling party — led by a man once celebrated by the credulous as a living example that