There comes a moment in some lives when a sudden, unexpected event makes you look at the world with greater clarity than before. It could be a happy moment: a childhood friend proposes to you, or you stumble into parenthood. It could be a sad one: you are diagnosed with cancer and told you have six months to live. It makes you look at the world differently, and some things seem so clear that you wonder why you did not notice them before. In the life of our nation, the rise of Yogi Adityanath to the chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh+ might well be one such unexpected yet clarifying moment. I was stunned when it was announced; and yet, it makes so much sense that any counterfactual now seems absurd. It was, I have come to believe, a decisive and inevitable event in a conflict that has been simmering in India for at least a century. The great battle that took place on our peninsula was not between the natives and our colonial overlords, but between a new way of thinking and an old way of existing. While the Enlightenment swept its way across Europe and the US in the 18th century, its influence was felt in India only in the 19th. Liberalism, however one tries to spin it, was an import from the West, and it is ironic that many of our finest freedom fighters were influenced by British thinkers. The great early figures of our resistance — heroes of mine such as Naoroji, Ranade, Agarkar and Gokhale — were essentially British liberals.

The hurly burly of campaigning is over. Samajwadi Party chief and UP CM Akhilesh Yadav has just come back from Ambedkar Nagar after addressing a rally for the by-election to Alapur constituency be held on Thursday and has addressed a press conference in Lucknow. After days of hectic campaigning - addressing almost seven rallies a day over a month - Akhilesh settles for a quiet lunch on Tuesday with wife and Kannauj MP Dimple Yadav.

Nepal will hold its first local elections in two decades in May, the government has announced, a key moment in the country's fraught transition to democracy. The impoverished Himalayan nation emerged from a brutal decade-long civil war in 2006, which brought the end of the 240-year-old Hindu monarchy and transformed it into a secular republic. But deep political divides have prevented it from implementing a new constitution that paves the way for elections, but which the minority Madhesi community says leaves them politically marginalised. "The government has taken a historic decision. The election will be held in a single phase across the country," Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal said following a late night cabinet meeting on Monday.

VK Sasikala who was on Sunday elected as the leader of the AIADMK legislature party, said the development in the party had shattered the hopes of the opposition parties in the state. "The development has come shattering the expectation of our political opponents that there will be a split in the party after the demise of our Amma (Jayalalithaa)," Sasikala said after party MLAs unanimously elected her as their leader. The development paves the way for her becoming the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and she is expected to be sworn in on Tuesday. Sasikala had a special word of praise for Panneerselvam, stating "whenever the party faced tough times and whenever there were difficulties in Amma becoming the chief minister, it was our dear brother Panneerselvam who has been loyal." "It was Panneerselvam who had first persuaded me to become the Chief Minister and General Secretary as well when Jayalalithaa passed away," Sasikala told party legislators in her acceptance speech.