In the gathering storm over the decades that led to Indian independence in 1947, a key colonial argument against Indian nationalism was that India had never really been one nation state but an agglomeration of states. If the glue, also known as the British Empire, came unstuck, then things would simply fall apart.
The British finally left, and post partition India has since not only kept its border integrity, but the idea of India itself has flourished. Despite the enormous diversity, India has believed in itself.
This week, as results for five Indian state elections came in, you might have been reminded of the old colonial debate. India's largest province, Uttar Pradesh (population nearly 200 million), which is really several provinces rolled into one, voted into power a regional party called the Samajwadi, or Socialist, Party. Not only were the claims of the two major national parties, the centrist Congress and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party roundly ignored, but both were trounced badly.
Then came Punjab's turn. Divided down the middle when India was partitioned in 1947, Punjab has never voted in the same government twice - except this time, as it rejected the Congress again and kept faith with yet another regional party, the Shiromani Akali Dal.
Clearly, India seems to be in the middle of an enormous transformation. Definitive statements are impossible in the context of such change, but it's evident that regional parties are striking a chord with voters because they are seen as intimates who understand local issues. National parties received a drubbing in Uttar Pradesh - a state that is widely seen as a bellwether to the national mood as it has 80 seats out of 545 in the federal parliament - because their leaders were seen to be city slickers living in faraway Delhi and out of touch with Lucknow, the provincial capital.
For Rahul Gandhi, son of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi and party general secretary, this rout is a personal debacle. In India, the Gandhi family is the democratic equivalent of royalty and Mr Gandhi is its heir-apparent. For several months before the Uttar Pradesh election, Mr Gandhi stormed the state in a helicopter, addressing several rallies a day, exhorting people to give the Congress party a chance.
They heard him - and cast their ballot in favour of the other Young Turk-equivalent, 38-year-old Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party. Mr Yadav benefited from voters' anger against outgoing chief minister and Dalit leader Mayawati, who people believed had squandered much of the province's wealth on monuments to herself and other Dalit leaders.
In contrast to Mr Gandhi, Mr Yadav campaigned across Uttar Pradesh in his car and on his bicycle, the party symbol, stressing his accessibility to the people.
Mr Yadav reinvented the party organisation on the ground. And he modernised the party, which, only five years ago under his father and former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, had openly come out against the use of computers and the study of English in Uttar Pradesh's schools and colleges.
Explaining her party's abysmal performance, Sonia Gandhi noted that there had been too many leaders, a weak party organisation and bad party candidates. To this list she must add the unspoken fear that party faithful feel when they are around her and her children, Rahul and Priyanka. Up to the last, not one party leader was willing to criticise the Gandhis for their role in the rout.
If the Congress really wants to reinvent itself, the single most important thing it can do is to shed the perception of quasi-royal prerogative, wherein the king or queen does no wrong and all decisions must flow from the top.
If the message of the Uttar Pradesh polls is to be understood correctly, the opposite is happening in India. Democracy is taking root in the provinces, which is why voters are choosing local representatives rather than those who parachute in from outside.
To be fair to the Gandhis, they may be perfectly willing to listen to criticism. In fact, in India, the criticism of dynasty is a superficial one. Mr Gandhi did not fail in Uttar Pradesh because of the middle-class, largely urban obsession with his forefathers - after all, Mr Yadav is also the son of a major Indian politician, as are scores of other young politicians in India today - but because he wields power in a distant sort of way.
The stages in Mr Gandhi's Uttar Pradesh rallies were so far from the crowds - as per the security manual, considering all the assassinations in his family - that you had to strain your eyes to see the man. He spoke, he introduced the candidate and he moved on to the next rally.
That's no longer the way to win India. To capture hearts and minds you have to linger, talk to people, show passion and commitment. Even more important, you have to create a second and third-rung of leaders. In turn, they will create an organisation of party workers on the ground.
And if you can't do any of the above, you have to seek alliances with regional parties.
The Congress disdained offers by the Samajwadi party to ally in Uttar Pradesh, believing they would win enough seats to play kingmaker. The Samajwadi party and the Akali Dan won because they heard the heartbeats on the ground.
As for the colonial debate, you can trust the imperialists to have misread the country. India lives in its villages and in its districts, which is why provinces are disdaining so-called elitist, national parties. The message from India's polls is actually an inversion of the colonial argument. Perhaps that is why the country takes such pleasure in burying it.
Jyoti Malhotra is a political and foreign affairs analyst based in Delhi
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
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The%20specs
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Specs
Engine: Duel electric motors
Power: 659hp
Torque: 1075Nm
On sale: Available for pre-order now
Price: On request
Things Heard & Seen
Directed by: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, James Norton
2/5
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
Top tips to avoid cyber fraud
Microsoft’s ‘hacker-in-chief’ David Weston, creator of the tech company’s Windows Red Team, advises simple steps to help people avoid falling victim to cyber fraud:
1. Always get the latest operating system on your smartphone or desktop, as it will have the latest innovations. An outdated OS can erode away all investments made in securing your device or system.
2. After installing the latest OS version, keep it patched; this means repairing system vulnerabilities which are discovered after the infrastructure components are released in the market. The vast majority of attacks are based on out of date components – there are missing patches.
3. Multi-factor authentication is required. Move away from passwords as fast as possible, particularly for anything financial. Cybercriminals are targeting money through compromising the users’ identity – his username and password. So, get on the next level of security using fingertips or facial recognition.
4. Move your personal as well as professional data to the cloud, which has advanced threat detection mechanisms and analytics to spot any attempt. Even if you are hit by some ransomware, the chances of restoring the stolen data are higher because everything is backed up.
5. Make the right hardware selection and always refresh it. We are in a time where a number of security improvement processes are reliant on new processors and chip sets that come with embedded security features. Buy a new personal computer with a trusted computing module that has fingerprint or biometric cameras as additional measures of protection.
Draw for Europa League last-16
Istanbul Basaksehir v Copenhagen; Olympiakos Piraeus v Wolverhampton Wanderers
Rangers v Bayer Leverkusen; VfL Wolfsburg v Shakhtar Donetsk; Inter Milan v Getafe
Sevilla v AS Roma; Eintracht Frankfurt or Salzburg v Basel; LASK v Manchester United
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
RESULT
Los Angeles Galaxy 2 Manchester United 5
Galaxy: Dos Santos (79', 88')
United: Rashford (2', 20'), Fellaini (26'), Mkhitaryan (67'), Martial (72')
Company%20Profile
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Other ways to buy used products in the UAE
UAE insurance firm Al Wathba National Insurance Company (AWNIC) last year launched an e-commerce website with a facility enabling users to buy car wrecks.
Bidders and potential buyers register on the online salvage car auction portal to view vehicles, review condition reports, or arrange physical surveys, and then start bidding for motors they plan to restore or harvest for parts.
Physical salvage car auctions are a common method for insurers around the world to move on heavily damaged vehicles, but AWNIC is one of the few UAE insurers to offer such services online.
For cars and less sizeable items such as bicycles and furniture, Dubizzle is arguably the best-known marketplace for pre-loved.
Founded in 2005, in recent years it has been joined by a plethora of Facebook community pages for shifting used goods, including Abu Dhabi Marketplace, Flea Market UAE and Arabian Ranches Souq Market while sites such as The Luxury Closet and Riot deal largely in second-hand fashion.
At the high-end of the pre-used spectrum, resellers such as Timepiece360.ae, WatchBox Middle East and Watches Market Dubai deal in authenticated second-hand luxury timepieces from brands such as Rolex, Hublot and Tag Heuer, with a warranty.
Usain Bolt's World Championships record
2007 Osaka
200m Silver
4x100m relay Silver
2009 Berlin
100m Gold
200m Gold
4x100m relay Gold
2011 Daegu
100m Disqualified in final for false start
200m Gold
4x100m relay Gold
2013 Moscow
100m Gold
200m Gold
4x100m relay Gold
2015 Beijing
100m Gold
200m Gold
4x100m relay Gold
Company Profile
Name: JustClean
Based: Kuwait with offices in other GCC countries
Launch year: 2016
Number of employees: 130
Sector: online laundry service
Funding: $12.9m from Kuwait-based Faith Capital Holding
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Company%20profile
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The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5