In an essay published just before the General Elections of 2009, I had argued that for Indian democracy to become more focused and effective, four things needed to happen: First, the Congress party had to rid itself of its dependence on a single family. Rahul Gandhi had a right to be in politics, but not to [...]
The most admired human being on the planet may be a one-time boxer named Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. To spend three decades in prison fighting racial oppression, and then guide and oversee the peaceful transition to a multi-racial democracy, surely ranks as the greatest personal achievement since the end of the Second World War. For the capaciousness [...]
In Zareer Masani’s recent memoir of his parents, And All is Said, he quotes a letter written to him by his mother in 1968. ‘Yesterday we went to Mrs Pandit’s reception for Rajiv Gandhi and his wife’, wrote Shakuntala Masani, adding: ‘I can’t tell you how dim she is, and she comes from a working-class family. [...]
On the 30th of January, 2008, a group of scholars working on Gandhi convened in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. The organizers had in mind a day-long, informal, unstructured, conversation on what aspects of the Mahatma’s legacy were still relevant. I had been invited, and would have gone, except that I had already accepted an invitation [...]
I know that we may be speaking here of a race to the bottom, but I would still like to claim that the political culture of the state where I live, Karnataka, is more degraded than that of any other state of the Union. Consider these three, discrete, events that occurred in a single month, July [...]
On the last day of June, I went to the nearest branch of the NatWest Bank and paid the sum of 43 pounds and ninety-four pence, this being the money I owed to the Westminster City Council. With that act I formally ended a year as a bona fide, tax paying, resident of the most interesting [...]
In June 1992, Dr Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister in the Government of India, delivered the Foundation Day Address of the Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD). He spoke on the topic, ‘Environment and the New Economic Policies’. In his talk, Dr Singh urged ‘objective standards industry-wise for safeguarding the environment, asking industry to certify [...]
I... Nations need heroes, but the construction of a national pantheon is rarely straightforward or uncontested. Consider the debate in the United States about which faces should adorn the national currency. The founding figures of American Independence—Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin—are all represented on the dollar bill, albeit on different denominations. So are the 19th [...]
They say a writer is known by the enemies he makes. Earlier this week, I was alerted to an attack on me posted on the website of the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Mr Narendra Modi. ‘Ramachandra Guha’s impotent anger’, claimed Mr Modi’s website, ‘is typical of a snobbish but vacuous intellectual who simply cannot tolerate a [...]
Of the countries close to or bordering India, I have been once to China and Afghanistan, twice to Sri Lanka and Nepal, and three times to Pakistan. I have declined several invitations to visit Bhutan, but were anyone to invite me to Bangladesh or Burma I would accept without hesitation. I am told Bhutan is pretty—very [...]