By a cruel irony, India’s greatest woman leader, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, has become a yardstick for the denial of justice to women. Invoking the criteria of the “rarest of rare crimes,” the Supreme Court recently commuted the Delhi High Court’s death sentence on a man who had … Read More
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s current offer of a unilateral ceasefire in Kashmir has so drastically and qualitatively altered the ground reality against India that one cannot but fear that the countdown to the formal annexation of the state by Pakistan has begun. Unless discerning citizens, political scientists, strategic analysts, … Read More
By double-distilling the loyalty of Congressmen in the recent elections that saw her distastefully elected party president, Sonia Gandhi has lived up to the promise of her triumph at the May 1999 AICC session following the expulsion of Messers Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar – she will be … Read More
There has been a discernible frisson of excitement in intellectual and political circles in the capital ever since the leaders of the Mohajirs, Sindhis, Baluchis and Pakhtoons met at Acton Town Hall in London recently and declared the demise of the two-nation theory. Partition, Pakistan’s minority groups intoned at the … Read More
Unlike most analysts, I do not believe that RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan’s contentious recipe for inculcating patriotism among the minorities is at all aimed at the Muslims or Christians. Like other controversies in India, this one too is essentially an intra-Hindu affair, with the minorities being used as a smokescreen. … Read More
The Vatican’s reiteration, in the wake of the recent United Nations Summit of World Religious Leaders, that its real agenda is to convert every person in the world to the Roman Catholic variant of Christianity, is a sharp reminder of the divergence between the world-views of western and eastern civilizations. … Read More
At least in one respect, the Marxian dream has come true in India – the state has withered away. It’s an all-India phenomenon, not just in the blood-red villages of Bihar or West Bengal. What’s more, it’s given us the dictatorship of the proletariat. Some of us are now beginning … Read More
The non-dualism of the Hindu tradition has received a mortal blow from the BJP–Sangh parivar’s crude and ill-conceived overture to the Muslim community. Neither the BJP nor the Sangh parivar, basking in the self-perceived glow of their new-found secular credentials, will appreciate the damage they have done to the nation’s … Read More
All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others – George Orwell, Animal Farm Recent events involving two popular film stars have brought home this banal truth somewhat forcefully, and with it, the more acute concern that we may no longer be running a democracy, but rather, an … Read More
Now that a major politician like former Defence Minister Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav has taken the lead to help articulate a fitting national response to the butchery of over a hundred Hindu pilgrims in one blood-drenched night, the Union Government would do well to take the nation into confidence about … Read More
