After BJP’s emphatic victory in the West Bengal polls, all eyes are on the Punjab elections. Will the saffron party be able to make the cut? It is certainly sharpening its metaphorical knives in the AAP-ruled state, opines Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her weekly column The Great Game article The gloves are off in Punjab. The BJP is targeting the ruling AAP, which is hitting back at the Akali Dal — and implicitly, the BJP — by upping the ante against the 2015 sacrilege incidents. While the AAP will certainly fight to keep Punjab, the BJP will attempt to fragment the Sikh vote, in the hope that it can wean some people away. It’s clear the Shiromani Akali Dal and the BJP need each other. The Congress has a good chance of retaking Punjab — if its various factions can still come together and woo the citizenry in its favour, she writes, outlining where every party stands.Against the backdrop of the defection of seven AAP MPs to the BJP, we risk becoming a nation where riches and cunning matter more in politics than being consistent and scrupulous, and value is preferred over values, writes Ashok Lavasa, former election commissioner in his Edit article Time to revisit anti-defection law. Let the law not prohibit elected representatives from switching sides, but the MP/MLA must go back to the electors for a fresh mandate, giving voters the opportunity of soul-searching. Even if the party splits and the breakaway entity qualifies to be recognised as a separate party, the elected representatives must lose their seats, he suggests.There was considerable discussion about the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) process, which critics say the BJP used as an important electoral tool in the West Bengal poll to dislodge Mamata. Senior Fellow at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Ajay K Mehra, offers a more incisive view in his Op-Ed article The politics of voter lists in SIR. The ECI introduced ‘logical discrepancy’ as a new factor in the SIR to check the voter lists to allegedly modify them to the central government’s advantage, he writes. No mechanism of ‘logical discrepancy’ is mentioned in the constitution or a statutory document. ‘Logical discrepancy’ checks are conducted through software rather than through physical verification by ECI staff. The software compares the current data with the 2002 records. The discrepancies could include parent-name mismatches, implausible age differences between voter and parent, a difference in address, etc. The mechanism is faulty because it treats clerical mistakes, spelling errors and inadvertent spacing as grounds for deleting genuine voters’ names. If the BJP’s victory run continues like this with the support of the ECI, it threatens the political and electoral processes, he opines.The BJP has turned what once seemed impossible into reality, but this transformation was gradual and strategically crafted, writes senior journalist Jayanta Ghosal in his Op-Ed article The Bengal breakthrough. In 2021, the BJP had made a major leap, jumping from just three MLAs to 77 in the Assembly. That established the party as a serious contender. Through a process of trial and error, the BJP altered its approach for 2026. The party recognised that its core ideological themes; slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” and Hindutva alone would not deliver success. The BJP shifted its central message to “poriborton” (change). Despite this, defeating Mamata Banerjee was never going to be easy. One key factor was the Muslim vote, which constitutes roughly 30% of the electorate. The BJP had realised that unless this vote was fragmented, it would be difficult to defeat the Trinamool, he writes.There has been an unexpected collateral damage of the SIR process, says senior journalist Aunindyo Chakravarty Dent in Muslim vote bank hurt TMC. A section of Muslims in Bengal appears to be convinced that voting for the so-called ‘secular’ parties will not protect them — they have to organise through overtly ‘Muslim’ parties. This is an unfortunate descent into ghettoisation that West Bengal had evaded till now, he writes.As the nation commemorated the first anniversary of the Pahalgam attacks in J&K and Operation Sindoor that followed, the military operation offered important lessons for how the Indian military should prepare for the next crisis with Pakistan. The old distinction between the western and northern fronts is becoming less clear, writes former northern army commander Lt Gen DS Hooda (retd) in his Edit article Op Sindoor enforced our red lines. China need not open a front in Ladakh to influence an India-Pakistan crisis. It can do so through platforms, sensors, intelligence feeds and diplomatic signalling.Though the Western Command Operation Sindoor was a major military success, the challenge in the next round will be to translate the tactical victory into a durable strategic advantage, writes Lt Gen MK Katiyar (retd) former GOC-in-C in his Op-Ed article When India struck terror camps in Pak Punjab.Military capability is only as effective as the political direction behind it. In his Op-Ed article When Centre changed the calculus of restraint, Air Marshal Anil Chopra (retd), former Head, IAF (J&K), writes that previous governments had responded to Pakistani-backed terror with dossiers that were dismissed, diplomacy that went unanswered, and restraint that was exploited as weakness. That calculus was changed when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took full political ownership of Op Sindoor from the first hour to the last, providing the armed forces unambiguous clearance to act — without hesitation and without condition.Turning to science and technology, Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company, announced its new frontier model Mythos on April 7. Claude Mythos had autonomously identified thousands of previously unknown software flaws across every major operating system and major web browser.  With the Mythos model around AI readiness must become a top-tier priority for governments worldwide, writes UN Tech envoy Amandeep Singh Gill in his article Mythos moment is a wake-up call. Whether models such as Mythos will ultimately help defenders more than attackers is unclear, but Mythos is a reminder that AI does not respect borders, he writes. Common standards for safety, interoperability and responsible use will not emerge from any country acting alone. This is the backdrop for the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which convenes in Geneva on July 6-7.