Several events have conspired to create apprehensions about the report the Union Home Ministry-appointed interlocutors will submit regarding Jammu and Kashmir. As some dangerous formulations can be argued to fall within the purview of the constitution, and the valley is excited over the recent ‘private’ visit of a former executive … Read More
As a political manoeuvre to outclass BJP veteran L.K. Advani, who on 8 September unilaterally announced a nation-wide yatra against corruption, which many viewed as a last ditch claim to premiership in the event of mid-term polls, the Gujarat chief minister’s 13 September declaration of a three-day fast can be … Read More
As Christian evangelists intensify efforts to bring India under their sway, their brethren in the south are trying to (mis)use current excavations at Pattanam to revive the myth of Apostle Thomas arriving in the country in the first century AD and establishing a fledgling community. They are trying to link … Read More
There is startling synchronicity between Amethi MP Rahul Gandhi’s speech on the Lokpal issue in the Lok Sabha on Friday and the draft of the Jan Lokpal bill. This lends weight to suspicions that one objective of the Ramlila Maidan blitz is to destabilise Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and elevate … Read More
The term ‘civil society,’ as wisely noted by Shri K. Ashok Rao, president, National Confederation of Officers’ Associations (NCOA), is an integral part of neo-con lexicon. It denotes a group created by Capital and supported by Corporate Media. In this scheme of things, campaigns launched by foreign-funded NGOs are ‘civil … Read More
If a single event encapsulates the corruption, sleaze and political callousness that bedevils the common man today, it is the Commonwealth Games of 2010, whose reverberations are still roiling the polity and the ruling Congress party. Even as unending price rise drives the middle class and poor to despair, and … Read More
As the Russians went into Afghanistan at the end of December 1979, a cautious Soviet official is said to have remarked to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that the British had got themselves into serious trouble there a century earlier. “Are you comparing the imperialist British to our gallant Soviet boys?” … Read More
In a move reminiscent of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s startling decision to will her political party, including its workers and presumably also its voters and supporters, to her eldest son, Bilawal, the Congress president Sonia Gandhi secretly flew off to the United States for medical treatment, leaving behind … Read More
America’s startling political decision to arrest US citizen cum ISI lobbyist Ghulam Nabi Fai last month, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in India, follows a string of continuing face-offs between the two countries and suggests that Washington may have decided to dismount the Pakistani tiger. Tensions peaked with … Read More
The Indian entrepreneurial and middle classes have fueled a great land rush, even land grab, all over the country, causing acrimony and heartburn, at times even bloodshed. Over the past decade, farmers have been pressured to part with fertile multi-crop land for industrial, urban development and infrastructure projects, triggering fears … Read More
