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

The Modi Government’s War On The Intellect

The Telegraph

A term greatly beloved of the Modi Government is ‘surgical strike’. It was first invoked in September 2016, after a cross-border raid undertaken by the Indian Army on camps in Pakistan. In November of the same year, the Prime Minister’s sudden, catalysmic, withdrawal of the Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currrency notes was also termed a [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-30T07:42:23+00:00April 27th, 2019|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: André Béteille, D R Gadgil, Homi Bhabha, Narendra Modi, Nehru, Vikram Sarabhai, education policy|

In Praise Of the Dalai Lama

The Telegraph

In the last week of March 1959—exactly sixty years ago—the Dalai Lama fled to India, after a rebellion by his fellow Tibetans had been brutally crushed by the Chinese military. He entered what is now Arunachal Pradesh, and was then known as the North East Frontier Agency. He was riding a yak, and suffering from acute [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-02T13:10:12+00:00March 30th, 2019|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Claude Apri, India Chinese Politics, International Relations|

Why Mahatma Gandhi Would Not Have Wanted A Grand New Temple in Ayodhya

Hindustan Times

In 1932, a young Christian priest named Verrier Elwin was thrown out of his Church. Educated at Oxford, Elwin made his home among the Gonds of central India. He sought to bring education and health care to the adivasis, but refused to take the Gospel to them, out of respect for their own spiritual traditions. For [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-02T12:57:14+00:00February 10th, 2019|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Dalits, Meenakshi Temple Madurai, Sectarian, Verrier Elwin, secularism, syncretic|

Congress Lawyers Past And Present

Hindustan Times

On an April evening in the year 1917, a lawyer named Vallabhbhai Patel was playing bridge at the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad. This was, for him, a routine affair; every day, after his work at the Bar ended, he headed straight for the card table. This evening in April 1917 was different. Earlier in the day, [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:29:04+00:00November 4th, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|

Three World Cities

Hindustan Times

Ten years ago, in the now sadly defunct Mumbai edition of Time Out magazine, I wrote an essay arguing that there were only three properly world cities; London, New York, and Mumbai itself. They all had an extraordinary diversity of religious, ethnic and linguistic groups; all were great centres of trade, finance, and entrepreneurship; all had [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:33:44+00:00October 8th, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|

Lessons From Kerala

Hindustan Times

I first went to Kerala in 1993, in the company of the ecologist Madhav Gadgil. We had been asked to speak at a meeting organized by that remarkable peoples’ science organization, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad. We were received at Ernakulam Railway Station by the zoologist M. K. Prasad, a doyen of the KSSP. Despite his [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:31:14+00:00September 10th, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|

Speaking Satire To Power

The Telegraph

Milan Kundera once spoke of the importance, for subjects of a totalitarian regime, of ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ As important, to the citizens of a (professedly) democratic regime, is the struggle of satire against power. Rahul Gandhi has been the butt of jokes ever since he entered politics, and, more recently, Narendra Modi has [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:36:23+00:00July 21st, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Institute of Excellence, Jio Institute, Mukesh Ambani, Nita Ambani|

Three Things Karl Marx Got Mostly Right

Hindustan Times

In the course of doing two degrees in economics I was taught to regard Karl Marx as, in the words of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. His labour theory of value was rejected by my teachers; and his predictions about the immiserization of the proletariat and the imminent death of capitalism appeared [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:40:32+00:00May 5th, 2018|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs, Biography|Tags: Imperialism, Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy|

Between Rectitude And Responsibility

The Telegraph

One of my closest male friends is a senior IAS officer, now retired. He belongs to a family of scholars and public servants, and has degrees from two of the world’s great universities. He has some special areas of expertise, such as education and health, and speaks four Indian languages fluently. With these skills, and without [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-06T14:42:04+00:00April 14th, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Indian democracy, Judiciary, Justice Chelameshwar|

Choosing The Ten Greatest Indians

Hindustan Times

When, in August 2017, India marked the seventieth year of its freedom from British colonial rule, the Hindustan Times did a series of long stories on seventy of this and seventy of that: the seventy best books written since Independence, the seventy greatest sportspersons since Independence, the seventy finest films since Independence, the seventy most influential [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2018-11-04T13:44:53+00:00April 8th, 2018|Categories: Politics and Current Affairs, Culture|Tags: Aurobindo Ghose, Gandhi, Horniman, Indian National Herald, J C Bose, Lajpat Rai, M M Malviya, Motilal Nehru, P C Ray, Sarojini Naidu, Srinivas Sastri, Tagore|