Politics and Current Affairs – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

The Opening and Closing of the Hindu Mind

The Telegraph

“What am I? Asiatic, European, or American? I feel a curious medley of personalities in me.” — Swami Vivekananda In 1873, the social reformer, Jyotirao Phule, published a searing critique of the caste system. Entitled Gulamgiri, the book was written in Marathi, yet it carried a dedication in English. This expressed the author’s admiration for “the [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-06-06T17:20:59+00:00March 27th, 2021|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: B R Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, M S Golwalkar, RSS, Rabindranath Tagore, Rammohan Roy, Sangh, Swami Vivekananda, parochialism|

Where the Hard Right Meets the Hard Left

The Telegraph

I have been reading the memoirs of Dora Russell, a pioneering British feminist and educationist. These were published in three volumes, of which I have just finished the first. This covers her upbringing in Edwardian England, her education at Cambridge, the development of her views on gender equality, an experimental school she established, and the years [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-06-06T16:29:42+00:00March 13th, 2021|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs, Biography|Tags: Bertrand Russell, Bolsheviks, Dora Russell, Francois Furet, Hindutva, P C Mahaonobis, Rabindranath Tagore, The assing of an Illusion, authoritarianism, communism, freedom of speech|

Why Modi and Shah Fear Young Activists

NDTV.com

Why would the Indian state arrest a twenty-one-year-old woman activist who seeks a cleaner and safer planet? Should not the country want young people to look beyond their narrow personal interests to the interests of society at large? Why did our Government lock up a young citizen seeking to build a better future for herself and [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-03-28T22:04:12+00:00February 16th, 2021|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: BJP ideology, Devangana Kalitha, Disha Ravi, Draft Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, Fridays for the Future FFF, Natasha Narwal, Nikhil Wagle, Safoora Zargar, Umar Khalid, activism, democracy, environment, freedom of speech|

In Praise of Archives and Archivists

The Telegraph

In the third week of January 2020—exactly a year ago—I was in New Delhi, working in the collections of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I first discovered the archival riches of the NMML in the early 1980s, and explored them most fully while living in Delhi between 1988 and 1994. In those years I would [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-03-28T21:40:28+00:00January 16th, 2021|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Abhishekh Choudhary biographer of Atal Behari Vajpayee, Akshata Mukul biographer of Jayaprakash Narayan, B R Nanda, Hari Dev Sharma, NMML, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Rahul Ramagundam biographer of George Fernandes, Ravinder Kumar|

Lessons in Leadership from Satish Dhawan

The Telegraph

The late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam liked to tell stories with morals. A story he was particularly fond of related to the launch of a satellite by the Indian Space Research Organization in July 1979. Kalam was in charge of the project at ISRO; and when some members expressed reservations about its readiness he overruled [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-10-28T09:17:10+00:00September 26th, 2020|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs, Biography|Tags: Abdul Kalam, Aravamudan, IISc, ISRO, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Space Research Organisation, JRD Tata, Kamladevi Chattopadhyay, Nalini Nirodi, Roddam Narsimha, Satish Dhawan, Vikram Sarabhai|

5 Reasons Why Rahul Gandhi Cannot Take on Modi for PM

NDTV.com

Those who oppose Hindutva seek to recover the founding principles of the freedom struggle, such as religious and linguistic pluralism, gender and caste equality, a critical attitude to state power, and an open-ness to other cultures and civilizations: all principles which Hindutva threatens to abandon or overthrow. But the closer one gets to 2024, the battle [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-10-27T18:52:05+00:00August 18th, 2020|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|

A Brief History of Cults of Personality

The Telegraph

The term ‘cult of personality’ is thought to have been first used with regard to the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Stalin died in 1953, after more than two decades in power; three years later, in a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, his successor Nikita Khrushchev spoke of how [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-10-27T18:44:21+00:00August 1st, 2020|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: BJP, Dictatorship, Indira Gandhi, Narendra Modi, democracy, emergency|

The Perilous State of Press Freedom in India Today

The Telegraph

In 1824, the Government of Bengal (which was then in the hands of the East India Company) issued an Ordinance placing strict curbs on the freedom of the press. This gave the government the powers to cancel a newspaper’s license without any explanation. The Ordinance provoked outrage among the intelligentsia of Kolkata, active in editing and [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-07-11T18:49:20+00:00June 20th, 2020|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Amartya Sen, Prime Minster Modi, Ram Mohan Roy, Ram Mohun Roy, authoritarianism, democracy, freedom of the press|

Why Modi has Failed India

NDTV.com

Last week, the respected US rating agency Moody’s downgraded India’s sovereign rating to Baa3, the lowest grade. It thereby joined Standard and Poor and Fitch, which had already relegated India to the bottom rung in this regard. Explaining their decision, Moody’s said: ‘While today’s action is taken in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, it was [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-07-11T18:36:52+00:00June 9th, 2020|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: BJP, Indian economy, Prime Minister Modi, Sectarian, communalism, personality of cult|

Why our Classical Music may be the Best Antidote to our Chauvinism

The Telegraph

Most evenings, I knock off from work and listen to Indian classical music for an hour or so before dinner. In the past, I would play CDs or cassettes I had collected over the years; now, I forage through the capacious repository that is YouTube. Sometimes I select an artist or a particular raga; at other [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-07-11T18:37:48+00:00June 6th, 2020|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs, Culture|Tags: Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Hamsadhvani, Hindutva, Muslim, Shivarama Karanth, multi cultural democracy, pluralism, secularism|