I write this on Tuesday the 21st of July, with the Bangalore edition of The Hindu in front of me. The front page carries a large photograph of Mallikarjun Kharge, the veteran Congress leader from Karnataka who is currently the de facto leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. Interestingly, the photo does not accompany [...]
‘I had always believed that Mrs Gandhi had no faith in democracy, that she was by inclination and conviction a dictator. This belief has tragically turned out to be true’. Jayaprakash Narayan, prison diary, entry of 22 July 1975 ‘I have no more powers than I had before’. Indira Gandhi, in an interview with NBC, 24 [...]
As we mark the 40th anniversary of the promulgation of the Emergency, we shall hear many politicians speak about their sufferings and sacrifices. L. K. Advani has already spoken, and no doubt other BJP leaders will follow. Perhaps we should remind them that Sanjay Gandhi’s wife Maneka is one of their Cabinet Ministers, while his henchman [...]
Shortly after the UPA Government was re-elected in 2009, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, received five fascinating letters from a man living in Bhopal. The first letter shredded the Government’s plans to set up a slew of new IITs. It pointed out that ‘the new institutions will find it very difficult to find good faculty’. [...]
I was recently in Japan, and asked my hosts what memories remained in that country of Subhas Chandra Bose, the great Indian patriot who fought alongside the Japanese against the British and whose ashes are believed to be housed in a temple in Tokyo. They answered that Subhas Bose was familiar only to specialists in Indian [...]
When I was young, many of my dreams were about cricket. I was then obsessed with the game, which I played quite seriously at both school and university. My college eleven may have been the best in India: two of my team-mates went on to play Test cricket, while several others played in the Ranji and [...]
The Urdu word ‘shareef’ has many meanings. An online dictionary offers ‘noble’, ‘gentlemanly’, and ‘civilized’, to which one can add: ‘refined; courteous; honourable; civil; civilized’. Among the most shareef men I knew was the conservationist Zafar Futehally. Raised and educated in Bombay, Futehally’s early interest in birds was furthered when he married Laeeq, niece of the [...]
Thirty years ago this fortnight, the Supreme Court passed its famous judgment in the Shah Bano case. A Muslim man had divorced his wife and stopped providing for her maintenance. The brave woman fought the injustice all the way to the highest court of the land. Finally, on the 23rd of April 1985, a five judge [...]
Rammohan Roy was able to assimilate the ideals of Europe so completely because he was not overwhelmed by them; there was no poverty or weakness on his side. He had ground of his own on which he could take his stand and where he could secure his acquisitions. The true wealth of India was not hidden [...]
There is a paradox at the heart of Indian public life today: that while the country has a right-wing party in power, right-wing intellectuals run thinly on the ground. This makes India an exception among the world’s established democracies. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany all have a long lineage of first-rate intellectuals on [...]