The unfinished issue at Ayodhya has once again returned to the centre stage, and as before, reflects the intransigence of sections of the political elite on the issue of Hindu reassertion and the nations’ foundational ethos. What is also increasingly evident is that the Muslim community is essentially directionless on … Read More
Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s decision to incorporate a meeting with Pope John Paul II into the itinerary of his European Union summit last week was hasty, unnecessary, and unwise, and can be expected to have a long-term deleterious impact on this country’s sovereignty and national interests. What is more, it … Read More
It is a tribute to the success of India’s uniquely perverted secularism that only Muslim leaders and intellectuals have seen fit to respond to Mohammad Azharuddin’s claim that he is being accused in the international match-fixing scandal on account of belonging to the minority community. Cornered in the rising tide … Read More
The recent controversy over the RSS conducting training camps in Punjab has brought the issue of the nation’s defining ethos to the fore once again. As was only to be expected, the vociferous proponents of the so-called ‘composite culture’ (an euphemism for the cultural supremacy of Islam) observed a deafening … Read More
As the Congress flounders for direction and leadership, there is little recognition that the real crisis is not so much Ms Sonia Gandhi’s political acts of omission and commission, as the yawning disjunction between her true face and the rhetoric of her spin-doctors. This is why the “crisis of confidence” … Read More
Several unresolved issues of India’s nationhood have coalesced in the recent incident of the beating up of two senior army officers in the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, and the episode will no doubt have a decisive influence on all future discourse on nationalism. For one, it has exposed the naked … Read More
The growing disillusionment of the Congress with Ms Sonia Gandhi’s uninspiring leadership and the inner party centralism sponsored by her coterie is a classic instance of mistaking the symptom for the disease. Congress has been rootless for far longer than it has been headless, and it is surprising that the … Read More
Even as the Centre dithers over whether or not to bring out a White Paper on ISI activities in India and whether or not to call a halt to the Samjhauta Express and Lahore bus service which have seriously compromised the country’s security and the integrity of its currency, Congress … Read More
Serious-minded academics and writers have for some time now been concerned at the subterranean but nevertheless quite impregnable alliance between leading publishing houses and a certain genre of scholarship and penmanship in the country. But so far the evidence has been indirect, either in the form of a cold rebuff … Read More
The Congress party’s sense of history having eroded as sharply as its sense of identity under the present leadership, it was perhaps not surprising to find it joining the Left parties in Parliament to prevent Human Resources Development Minister Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi from replying to the substantive issues involved … Read More
