In an ungracious last act, Ms Banerjee indicated she is refusing to step down, saying the other side cheated. She must go. Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won, and is set to run West Bengal for the first time. The vote was part of a wave that toppled incumbents in various states. In Kerala the communist rulers were sent packing. In Tamil Nadu an action-movie- star-turned-politician, the mononymous Vijay, swept away an old dynasty. All this is evidence that Indian democracy works, albeit imperfectly. Election results broadly reflect the voters’ will. The results also confirm that Mr Modi’s party remains strong, despite electoral wobbles in the dozen years since he won national office. The BJP is better organised than its rivals. And it promotes ideology—mixing Hindu nationalism and promises of growth—far more skilfully. With allies, it now runs over two-thirds of India’s states and territories, home to 80% of its population. Even the once-hostile south is warming somewhat to the prime minister. Nonetheless, there are reasons to worry. To keep democracy healthy, the BJP must keep its ambitions and tactics within bounds. At times it does not. Even if the final result in West Bengal was correct, some of Ms Banerjee’s complaints of unfairness are justified. The national government deployed almost a quarter of a million armed police to oversee voting there. A heavyhanded process of revising electoral rolls disfranchised millions of voters, many of whom got no chance to appeal. The Election Commission, which has been supervising this, is in theory an impartial referee. Under Mr Modi’s prime ministership, it looks increasingly supine. Politics risks becoming narrower and uglier. Parties too often aim to split voters along religious lines. In both West Bengal and Assam the BJP won a big share of Hindu voters in part by stirring up fear of Muslims. The party may say that its opponents should try harder—they have largely failed to produce either credible leaders or a compelling response to its Hindu- nationalist agenda. Yet Mr Modi’s government has also hobbled them with criminal investigations, twisted party-financing rules in its own favour and co-opted much of the media. Mr Modi will be tempted to ignore such criticisms. After all, his strident version of politics is working pretty well for him. But it is in tension with his
other source of electoral success: a vibrant economy, bolstered by his own willingness to push through welcome reforms. That economic tailwind may now be dying. Rising energy costs will hurt consumers in the months ahead and could turn some of those voters against him. He may try to compensate by doubling down on divisiveness. Yet that would be bad for India—and perhaps for Mr Modi, too. The country’s long-term economic success depends on stability and the rule of law, both of which could be undermined by an overmighty and aggressive ruling party. In victory, Mr Modi should show restraint. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/05/07/narendra-modis-party-is-on-a-roll-in-
The world must stop AI from empowering bioterrorists The threat from new pathogens is an even graver danger than AI-backed hackers May 7th 2026 Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon add biology to its list of superhuman abilities. Anthropic’s Mythos model—already withheld from general release owing to its hacking skills—recently succeeded on a third of the most difficult data-crunching tasks pulled together by biology experts. Mythos could do things that were beyond all of the tested humans, such as reverse- engineering a cell type from raw DNA data. As we report, problem-solving like that means AI may soon grant people extremely dangerous powers: to synthesise viruses, generate novel neurotoxins or assemble omnicidal “mirror life”. Such dangers are the dark
side of AI’s wonderful promise to democratise intelligence. It is even conceivable that an AI could give a misanthropic loner the power to end humanity. Biosecurity risks are thus far worse than cyber-security ones. If one engineered virus may cause billions of deaths, humanity has no room to learn from mistakes. There may be no “defender’s dividend”, in which AI itself helps forestall the danger. Software can be fixed quickly, but human biology is far less malleable. Making models safe for release will therefore require breakthroughs in the fundamental science of ai. How much time is there? Today’s public AI models are book smart, acing paper tests, yet fortunately still appear to give novices little practical help at the laboratory bench. But Anthropic, the maker of (non-public) Mythos, warns that it may soon be able to guide novices through tricky lab work. Mythos and its peers have not been tested for their practical abilities, which means they may already have such a capability. Models with these talents will—like nuclear weapons—never be safe in public hands. And today’s techniques for making them safe fall short. One option, for example, is to try to make them refuse dangerous requests. “Jailbreaking” these models by tricking them into giving forbidden answers has become harder, but in one recent study 90% of the novice participants were still able to extract answers about virology from models that ought to have clammed up. Gambling the future of humanity on such defences would be a mistake. Another measure is to exclude dangerous data from models’ training runs. SecureBio, a think-tank, suggests removing information about mirror life, obtaining live pathogens, bypassing biodefence guardrails and assessing pandemic potential. The trouble is that a sufficiently capable model may work out the excised knowledge from first principles. Similar attempts to remove child-sexual-abuse material from the training data of image generators did not succeed. A system trained on benign images can depict obscenities it has never seen. A third idea is to focus on the physical world. Governments’ security services could and should pay more attention to the vendors of technologies,
such as DNA synthesis, with both legitimate and nefarious uses. “Know your customer” regulations should limit such services to established researchers. But creating viruses is not like building a nuke, which requires scarce and traceable material. In biology using off-the-shelf technology for lethal ends is relatively easy. The state cannot monitor every Petri dish. Scientific breakthroughs will therefore be needed, to create new kinds of safeguards. One promising approach is the equivalent of brain surgery on models after they are trained. Another technique teaches models to favour wrong answers in some areas; yet another could be to uncover and disable the neurons that activate in work on synthetic biology. That would require advances in foundational AI science so as to crack open the “black box” of existing neural networks. Until such techniques exist, governments must limit access to systems that might enable bioterrorism. This matters especially for open-source models, which cannot be recalled once they have been disseminated, and whose use cannot be monitored. Responsible researchers should be able to use AI to advance the frontiers of science—DeepMind’s Isomorphic Labs is developing novel cancer therapies, for example—but under security protocols. There is no point harnessing AI to improve lives if it also gives terrorists the power to make humans extinct. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/05/07/the-world-must-stop-ai-from- empowering-bioterrorists
To fight antisemitism, first grasp where it comes from What looks like a 21st-century problem has deep, dark roots May 7th 2026 The hatred looks different this time. There are no ghettos or pogroms; no European government espouses it. In some ways the recent surge of antisemitism—including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London on April 29th—has a distinctly 21st-century character. Stand back, though, and the mindset of prejudice is horribly familiar. So are the risks: for Jews across the world, but not only for Jews. The bloodshed in Golders Green, a hub of Britain’s small Jewish community, followed a spate of firebombings at Jewish sites in London. Last October an attack on a synagogue in Manchester killed two congregants. Heartbreakingly, many British Jews for the first time feel obliged to play
down their Jewishness in public: slipping star-of-David pendants inside shirts, removing skullcaps en route to school or work. These fears are not uniquely British. In March synagogues were targeted in Michigan and the Netherlands. In December, after a crescendo of hate crimes, 15 people were murdered at a Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach in Australia. Rage over Gaza, especially among Islamists, is an important but oversimplified explanation. Antisemitism did indeed spike in Europe and America with the atrocities in Israel on October 7th 2023 and the ensuing war. Yet an explanation is not an excuse. Everyone should be able to distinguish between an elderly man at a London bus stop and a Middle Eastern state. Jews’ views on Israel (whatever they are) can never justify their persecution. No opinion should be punishable with violence. Some in the West take a cold comfort in attributing the problem to immigrants. In truth Islamism, virulent as it can be, is only one of the circles in what Sir Mark Rowley, Britain’s top policeman, calls a “ghastly Venn diagram of hate”. Much of the left endorses a bogus moral framework in which Jews rank as colonisers and can never be victims. Much of the nativist right thinks Jewish globalists are plotting the West’s downfall—the deranged motive for previous shootings in Pennsylvania and California. Hostile states use proxies to strike abroad: Iran’s hand has been detected in some recent attacks. In all these ways, today’s antisemitism looks like a modern phenomenon— and you could add social media, which help recruit attackers and let neo- Nazis proselytise. Looming beneath, though, is the age-old myth of a sinister Jewish cabal, bent on power and subjugation. It is there in the depictions of Binyamin Netanyahu and George Soros as puppetmasters. It resounds in the idea that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is the wellspring of the world’s ills. Conspiracism is the common denominator; it is also a link between today’s prejudice and the hatreds in Nazi Germany or tsarist Russia. Conspiracist thinking flourishes amid upheavals: the rise and fall of empires, ideological ruptures or, as now, populism and war. With a sort of gravitational inevitability, it often defaults to the hoariest conspiracy theory, with its atavistic associations of Jews with greed and divided loyalties. Caricatured