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      Does India Offer a Glimmer of Hope for Democracy?

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      Prime Minister Modi was re-elected, but his party fell short in dominating Parliament. Was that an inflection point for the world’s largest democracy?This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which gathered experts last week in the Greek capital to discuss global issues.Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was elected to a third term in office in June, but his Bharatiya Janata Party failed to win a simple majority in the lower house of Parliament, surprising political observers inside and outside the country.With the B.J.P. winning only 240 of the 543 seats, far short of the 300 that party members had hoped for, Mr. Modi now leads a coalition government.India and the Allure of Modi, a panel discussion at the Athens Democracy Forum on Oct. 3, addressed this issue, focusing on the appeal — and the shifting role — of this galvanizing figure and the future of Hindu nationalism that had cemented much of his power. Ahead of the Democracy conference, two of the panelists, Yamini Aiyar and Maya Tudor, were interviewed by video for their take on Mr. Modi’s future and what it portends for the world’s largest democracy and for other democracies facing elections. Ms. Aiyar is a visiting senior fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and Ms. Tudor is the professor of politics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, and a fellow at St. Hilda’s College, both at Oxford University. The panel was moderated by Jyoti Thottam, senior editor and member of The New York Times editorial board.The interviews were edited and condensed.What is the allure of Narendra Modi, and how has it evolved?MAYA TUDOR Modi came to power in 2014 on the heels of several corruption scandals that had marred the previous governments. He was able to nationalize a strategy he had really honed in the state of Gujarat when he was the chief minister, which was to polarize in places where doing so reaped political dividends.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Missing Out on Coldplay’s India Tickets, Some Fans Vented — Even to Police

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      When 13 million people tried to buy tickets for the band’s Mumbai shows, the ticketing site crashed. Many who came up short cried foul, both online and to the authorities.When tickets for two Coldplay concerts in Mumbai, India, went on sale last month, about 13 million people visited an online ticketing platform to vie for around 90,000 seats. Within minutes, the show was sold out and the platform had crashed, only for the tickets to later be offered on other sites at steeply marked-up prices.In a country of 1.4 billion people, it is not unusual for demand to far outstrip supply for many things, from government jobs to public services. And as music fans in many places around the world are painfully aware, tickets to shows by popular artists can sell out in seconds.But what doesn’t usually happen is a rush to judgment on social media that something nefarious must be going on — and even a call to the police to lodge a complaint.In this case, even though Coldplay added another concert date and BookMyShow, the online platform selling the tickets, imposed a cap of four tickets per customer to avoid bulk buying, the police in Mumbai have questioned a senior BookMyShow official and twice summoned another high-ranking representative about the episode.There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the company, and BookMyShow officials said the website and app had malfunctioned and crashed because so many people had trying logging on at the same time. The company said on X that “scalping and black marketing of tickets was against Indian law,” and a BookMyShow official said in a statement that “any tickets bought from unauthorized sources will be at their own risk and may likely be invalid or fake tickets.”What is clear is that some can’t believe their bad luck.“I was frustrated and angry,” said Ishan Agarwal, an engineering student in Delhi who, despite logging in from his laptop, two phones and an iPad, failed to get a ticket.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Motel 6 Is Sold to Oyo, an Indian Hotel Company Expanding in the U.S.

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      A roadside chain for more than 50 years, Motel 6 was owned by Blackstone, the private equity giant. Oyo will pay $525 million in an all-cash deal.Motel 6, the budget hotel chain that has lined American highways for decades, will be sold to Oyo, an India-based hotel operator, the companies announced on Friday.Blackstone, the private equity giant and the owner of Motel 6’s parent company, said the transaction would be an all-cash deal for $525 million. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year, and would include the chain’s offshoot hotel brand, Studio 6.Oyo expanded into the United States in 2019, and has recently ramped up efforts to expand further. It currently operates more than 300 hotels domestically. The company, which specializes in budget hotels and proudly describes itself as “a start-up,” had received a large investment from SoftBank. But some troubling incidents in India in recent years raised questions about some of its business practices.Motel 6 was founded in 1962 in Santa Barbara, Calif., and has been an indelible part of Americana for its basic accommodations. The Motel 6 name originally came from the company’s offering of an all-cash $6-a-night rate. Motel 6 and Studio 6 currently have roughly 1,500 hotels across the United States and Canada, Blackstone said.Gautam Swaroop, the chief executive of Oyo International, praised Motel 6’s “strong brand recognition, financial profile and network in the U.S.” He added, “This acquisition is a significant milestone for a start-up company like us to strengthen our international presence.”Blackstone purchased Motel 6 in 2012 for $1.9 billion.“This transaction is a terrific outcome for investors and is the culmination of an ambitious business plan that more than tripled our investors’ capital and generated over $1 billion in profit over our hold period,” Rob Harper, a senior managing director at Blackstone, said in a statement. More

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      India’s Epidemic of Cow Vigilantism Unnerves Nation’s Muslims

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      An unexpectedly narrow victory at the polls for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-first agenda has not cooled simmering sectarian tensions, as some had hoped.A recent series of attacks by Hindus on Muslims in India have highlighted how sectarian violence remains a serious problem, even as the country seeks to define itself on the world stage as a robust democracy with equal rights for all.Despite a close election victory in June by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that many interpreted as a rebuff, there have been numerous instances of such violence, according to India-focused human rights organizations and a New York Times tally of local news reports. At least a dozen involve so-called cow vigilantism — violence related to the slaughter or smuggling of cows, or the suspicion of such acts.In August, a group of Hindu men beat up a 72-year-old Muslim man because they believed he was carrying beef in his bag. Also that month, a group that describes themselves as cow protectors fatally shot a 19-year-old Hindu student because they thought he was a Muslim smuggling cows, according to his family.The cow issue is deeply divisive because it pits the religious beliefs of one group against the diet of another. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter, as well as the sale or smuggling of beef. But beef is consumed by many Muslims. Religious violence is not rare in India, where more than one billion Hindus, around 200 million Muslims, 30 million Christians, 25 million Sikhs and other religious minorities coexist, sometimes uneasily.Under Mr. Modi, who has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2014, Muslims have increasingly become a target for hard-line Hindu groups affiliated with his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Hundreds of instances of religious violence, including lynching, beating and abuse, occur every year, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

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      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

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      The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris’s Identity

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      When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.By suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity, he was acting as if that choice hadn’t been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father. We saw this same orchestrated amnesia when Barack Obama set out to become the first Black president. It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.Trump’s questioning of Harris’s Black bona fides was swiftly denounced because Harris has long identified as Black, recounting a similar story to mine about her Indian mother explaining Harris’s Blackness to her as a child. In her 2019 autobiography, Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” And of course, Harris would go on to graduate from one of the most prestigious historically Black universities where she had joined the nation’s oldest Black sorority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Crisis for Vultures Led to a Human Disaster: Half a Million Deaths

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      The birds were accidentally poisoned in India. New research on what happened next shows how wildlife collapse can be deadly for people.To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.“Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning do matter to human beings,” said Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the new vulture study. “And it’s not always the charismatic and fuzzy species.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris y su herencia india, más allá de los memes

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      Harris ni presume ni oculta sus raíces indias. Hace una que otra referencia a ellas. También las utiliza estratégicamente.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Para la mayoría de las personas que vieron la cita que circuló esta semana como meme, solo se trataba de algo gracioso que Kamala Harris dijo en un discurso en 2023: “¿Creen que acaban de caerse de un cocotero?”.Sin embargo, para muchos indios e indios estadounidenses, la frase, que Harris atribuyó a su madre, tiene un significado más profundo. Tamil Nadu, el estado del sur de India del que es originaria la familia de su madre, es uno de los mayores productores de cocoteros del país. También es el tipo de cosa que diría un padre o una madre en India.Harris, vicepresidenta y candidata demócrata a la presidencia, ni presume ni oculta su herencia india. De vez en cuando hace alguna referencia. Y también la utiliza estratégicamente.El año pasado, Harris habló de su profunda conexión personal con India en una comida ofrecida en Washington para Narendra Modi, el primer ministro indio, a quien Estados Unidos ha estado cortejando. Su introducción a los conceptos de igualdad, libertad y democracia vino de su abuelo indio, con quien daba largos paseos durante sus visitas a Chennai, explicó Harris.“Fueron estas lecciones que aprendí a una edad muy temprana las que inspiraron mi interés por el servicio público”, afirmó.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More