Best of BS Opinion: When today's players keep blaming yesterday's script

Here are the best of Business Standard's opinion pieces for today

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Imagine an auditorium where the audience keeps shouting complaints at a performer who exited the stage six decades ago, while the spotlight struggles to settle on the ones currently fumbling their cues. That is the peculiar South Asian habit, treating history as a readily available alibi, a comfortable curtain we pull forward to hide what is happening under today’s harsh lights. From currency markets wobbling under global weather to economic blame-games older than most voters, the same theme keeps sneaking everywhere. One cannot keep putting the blame on the opening act when you yourself are now running the show, but today’s writeups show just how often we try. Let’s dive in. 

Take the rupee, whose slide past 90 a dollar would tempt anyone to locate some ancestral fault line. But as our first editorial notes, this is totally a present-tense drama due to a negative balance of payments, a widening trade deficit, and the tariff chill with Washington shaping India’s export future. The RBI, refusing theatrics, is letting the currency do its stabilising work, while reserves north of $688 billion keep panic at bay. With a potential trade deal inching forward by year-end, the plot belongs to today’s cast, not ghosts of old economic scripts. 

Our second editorial today turns the lens inward and onto India’s roads, where record-high accident deaths lay bare a crisis that can no longer be dismissed as inherited design flaws. It is simply a long-standing neglect that has morphed into a generational failure. Nearly half the victims are two-wheeler riders, yet budgets remain painfully thin and emergency systems inconsistent. Better design, sharper enforcement, and functioning trauma networks aren’t historical debts, they’re obligations of those directing the system today. 

And Ajay Chhibber’s column widens this lens, reminding us that blaming Nehru for India’s economic drift is both convenient and intellectually lazy. India’s divergence from its Asian peers happened later, through the choices of governments that doubled down on protectionism, expanded PSUs, nationalised banks, and resisted reforms even as the world pivoted. The licence raj didn’t endure because Nehru insisted, it endured because successors refused to rewrite the script. 

Nivedita Mookerji’s piece captures a similar instinct in the cyber-fraud saga as well, where the government is attempting to make smartphone makers the fall guy for decades of policy gaps. The hasty Sanchar Saathi mandate collapsed within a week because manufacturers can’t carry responsibility for scams they neither create nor enable. It is a reminder that digital governance needs consultation, not scapegoats. 

And then comes Akankshya Abismruta’s review of Yiyun Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow, shattering meditation on loss, a work that refuses blame altogether. Li rejects the search for reasons, the impulse to tidy grief or assign responsibility. Instead, she sits inside the unlit space that remains a quiet rebuke to a society forever hunting for an opening act to accuse, even when the story is already far into its final chapter. 

Stay tuned!