HOW NOT TO FIGHT EXTREMISM


Hindustan Times

In the spring of 1990, a great Indian patriot, the liberal jurist V. M. Tarkunde, led a team of independent citizens on a study tour of the Kashmir Valley. Many cases of police and army excesses were reported to them: beatings (sometimes of children), torture (of men innocent of any crime), extra-judicial (or ‘encounter’) killings, and [...]

THE TATTERED IDEAL


The Hindu

My friend T. R. Ramakrishna, a sportswriter and sports buff of an uncommon intelligence and senstivity, recently sent me a book published in the past which speaks directly to the present. The book is called Mexico 1968, and it was written by Christopher Brasher, who had been a ‘hare‘ in Roger Bannister’s successful attempt to break [...]

WATCHING THE WATCHDOG


The Telegraph

The formal institutions of Indian democracy are not especially marked by the capacity for self-correction and self-criticism. One fact should make this clear—that no senior politician, civil servant, or judge has ever been successfully convicted for corruption or abuse of power. What then of that great informal institution of Indian democracy, the press? Is there a [...]