UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s obvious complicity in the government’s appalling 17-day silence over the arrest of Italian fugitive Ottavio Quattrocchi is far more serious than ordinary suppression of information or contempt of the Supreme Court. Now that so much is known about the two decade old scandal, it is apparent … Read More
To those reared to believe in the protective parental shadow, Shamlalji’s passing away this morning represents the closure of a final chapter of childhood. The senior-most member of a tight-knit trinity comprising the late Prof. Sisir Gupta of Jawaharlal Nehru University, my own father and Shamlalji’s successor at The Times … Read More
The stoning of King Gyanendra’s cavalcade on the auspicious occasion of Shivaratri, supposedly by egalitarian Hindu devotees objecting to the custom of royal precedence, suggests growing Maoist fears that the forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly may not give them a winning mandate. Reports from Nepal indicate that the institution … Read More
On 28 January 2007, Delhi’s unpretentious Paharganj locality played host to thousands of Nepali Maoists, almost half of whom crossed over from the neighbouring country, while the rest were already residing in India. Held under the banner of the Nepali Jan Adhikaar Suraksha Samiti (Bharat), the 4700-strong gathering included representatives … Read More
Is it time for regime change in India, for Dr. Manmohan Singh to walk into the sunset? Uncle Sam, ever anxious to rearrange the world with friendly dictators and pliable democrats, seems to have woken up to the grand potential of Mr. Rahul Gandhi, whose scintillating thirty-month-old stint as Amethi … Read More
There is no taint of untouchability, says Atri, when a person is touched by an untouchable in a temple, during religious processions, sacrifices, festivals, and marriages (verse 249). Śātātapa avers that there is no dosha (lapse) in touching untouchables on the public road, in a religious procession or in a … Read More
Nepal Prime Minister G.P. Koirala must be ruing the day he allowed his Seven Party Alliance to be conned into negotiating with Maoist leader Prachand. Mr. Koirala has given respectability to a bunch of armed thugs, agreeing to bring them into an interim regime and allowing them to dictate an … Read More
To its everlasting shame, the UPA has preferred to allow family members of the police martyrs who lost their lives defending a terrorist attack upon Parliament in 2001 to return their gallantry awards, rather than meet the aggrieved families and assure them that no injustice would be done to dishonour … Read More
Fourteen years after the removal of the offending Babri structure at his sacred birthplace, Sri Rama returned on 6 December 2006 to face his greatest modern iconoclast, the late EV Ramasamy Naicker. EVR or Periyar, as he was popularly called, was the most avid native votary of the colonial myth … Read More
When Chinese envoy Sun Yuxi startled New Delhi by staking claim to the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit, he was simply reiterating the Middle Kingdom practice of never renouncing territorial claims. Chairman Mao once graphically delineated China’s territorial vision with Tibet forming the … Read More
