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
The mills of god grind slowly, the Bible says, but they grind exceedingly fine. The inexorability of this process ensured that the perfect timing of Saddam Hussain’s death sentence could not check the Republican Party’s freefall in America’s mid-term Congressional elections. Nemesis is a double-edged sword. Convicted with two others … Read More
The Delhi High Court’s award of death penalty to the killer of Priyadarshini Mattoo has given a sense of relief to citizens and justice to the aggrieved family, but the verdict in this high profile case that involved a grave miscarriage of justice for ten long years is still incomplete. … Read More
Muzaffarnagar District and Sessions Judge R.D. Nimesh has unwittingly brought the issue of uniform civil code to the national forefront once again by sentencing 60-year-old Ali Mohammed to ten years imprisonment for raping his daughter-in-law on 6 October 2005. Twenty-eight year old Imrana, wife of a rickshaw puller in Charthawal … Read More
Political Islam took its first mature step to recover agency from its Western tormentors by applying a healing touch to the bleeding fields of Karbala, where Mohammad’s nascent faith split irrevocably into Shias and Sunnis. While it is too early to gauge the impact of this largely ignored initiative by … Read More
Barely twenty four hours after Defence Ministry sources said the defunct Trishul surface-to-air missile project would be wound up in December this year, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee was forced to state that the project was being extended by a year. This is despite the fact that the Defence Research and … Read More
Dr. Farooq Abdullah’s staggering assertion that the sessions judge who awarded the death penalty to Afzal Guru for his role in 2001 attack on Parliament could be murdered by Kashmiri terrorists carries the implicit threat that the High Court and Supreme Court judges who upheld the verdict could meet a … Read More
A well orchestrated campaign against Hindu dharma has been launched in the name of animal rights and temple reform. If Hindu leaders are not vigilant about the sensitivities of the devout, non-believers will literally hold the community to ransom. I first noticed this danger in June 2002 when King Gyanendra … Read More
Although the Kerala Police have not spelled out the larger conspiracy to defame the Sabarimala shrine, there can be little doubt that actress Jaimala acted at the behest of her Christian co-religionists to secure non-Hindu intervention in the affairs of one of the holiest Hindu pilgrimages. The so-called incident became … Read More
Jains who have compromised their spiritual honour by demanding minority status must explain why ‘fellow minorities’ did not support ‘Jain personal law’ when two women recently undertook ‘sallekhana,’ one of whom is alive at the time of writing this piece. Regular readers are aware I place Jains within the Indic … Read More
