🎃We often think of the world in binaries—one end or the other. If it is not right, then it has to be left. If it is not the sun, then it is the moon. But what if the world refuses to be divided? What if there is a space in between, where contradictions exist, where the edges blur?
Outlook’s next issue, The Gridꦉ, explores the rising tide of binary politics—forcing people, identities, and nations into rigid camps. US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement—"As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female"—is one dangerous example of this. Likewise, other identities are becoming confrontational.
✅The deportation of illegal immigrants is another troubling impact of a policy that is formulated on binaries—insiders vs. outsiders, settlers vs. migrants, locals vs. aliens. Trump’s call to “uproot parasites” in America has led to Indians being herded into military planes and deported under inhuman conditions.
🎃In her opening note to the issue, Outlook's Editor Chinki Sinha posits the dilemma around that binary which has ruled human thoughts and actions since time immemorial: good and evil. "We are to be on the side of God, who is good," she writes. "But how does one define good? Is good a code? Like the binary code where opposites become the only places of belonging, the only ways of articulation."
🅠In his article "My Way or the Highway", Anand Teltumbde speaks of how the binary logic of absolute divisions has increasingly shaped global political discourse. He points out how George W. Bush's famous proclamation, “If you are not with us, you are against us” was not just a justification for the Iraq war but came to epitomise a dangerous worldview that has since proliferated across political and ideological spectrums.
ꩲThe idea of binaries also extends to our very relationship with nature. In the issue, Asmita Kabra, an Associate Researcher, explores the nature-culture binary, the idea that nature must be protected from human influence, and that people and wildlife cannot coexist.
🍌Tanvir Aeijaz, Associate Professor at the University of Delhi, writes about how the Hindu-Muslim binary is embedded in India's liberal democracy. A country of incredible diversity—language, religion, caste, sect, and culture—India has long defied simplistic classifications that define the quintessential Indian identity from ancient times to the present. Yet, the Hindu-Muslim binary erases the deep heterogeneity within both communities. It reduces the centuries of shared histories to a singular, fractured narrative.
💟In this issue you will find articles that have collapsed the binaries and others that take a different perspective.
✨Political columnist Ajay Gudavarthy raises the question: What after rejecting the binaries? He writes that binaries are problematic because they exclude, and therefore the growing demand to move away from binaries into a deconstructive mode that wishes to introduce to social processes constitutive fluidity and instability. When the lines of binary dissolve, what remains?
🌳Read these and more in the latest issue of Outlook.
