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
Discerning readers following the current controversy over the Indian Council of Historical Research’s decision to submit two volumes of the Towards Freedom series for review can be forgiven for thinking that it seems like much ado about nothing. They may wonder why camp followers and intellectuals of the Left have … Read More
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the Spirit of the Indian Constitution must have walked on the night President KR Narayanan delivered his unprovoked warning to the National Democratic Alliance Government against appointing a Committee to review that august document’s five-decade performance. Speaking at a function to commemorate the 50th … Read More
There can be no denying that recent disclosures of CBI investigations into the Bofors payoff scandal are extremely damaging to the late Rajiv Gandhi. In fact, these will reinforce the belief that his wife, Ms Sonia Gandhi, tailored her debut into Indian politics precisely to prevent this painful public denouement. … Read More
