Six weeks after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the (then undivided) Communist Party of India held a party congress in Calcutta. The General Secretary of the CPI was P. C. Joshi, who was of the opinion that the party must support Jawaharlal Nehru’s new Government. He believed that Nehru’s Cabinet represented a wide spectrum of public [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
If the mast-head of this newspaper was long enough, or if the type it uses was smaller, this column could have carried the title: ‘MEETING A MAESTRO ON A MISTY MORNING IN MANIPUR’. Over the past decade, the little and beautiful state of Manipur has replaced the larger and even more beautiful state of Nagaland as [...]
In my opinion, Test cricket may be compared to the finest Scotch, fifty-overs a side to Indian Made Foreign Liquour, and 20-20 to the local hooch. The addict who cannot have the first or the second will make do with the last. The pleasures of the shortest game are intense but also wholly ephemeral. There is [...]
Thirty-five years ago this week, a group of peasants in the upper Alakananda Valley stopped a group of loggers from felling a patch of forest. That act of protest gave birth to the Chipko Andolan and, by extension, to the Indian environmental movement. Through the 1970s, other peasants in the Himalya successfully prevented other loggers from [...]
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was by birth a Gujarati bania, but the admiration for his life and work transcended the boundaries of caste, language, religion, and gender. He was a man who was trusted by women, a Hindu who reached out to befriend Muslims, and a suvarna who fought for the rights of the lower castes. Above [...]
Many years ago, I had an argument with the philosopher Ramchandra (Ramu) Gandhi about his grandfather’s faith. I had always admired the Mahatma, but my secular-socialist self sought to rid him of the spiritual baggage which seemed unnecessary to his broader message. Could we not follow Gandhi in his empathy for the poor and his insistence [...]
In an interview given recently by the Pakistani cricketer-politician Imran Khan to Newsweek magazine, he said: ‘My vote bank is increasing’. To whom do we owe the term ‘vote bank’? I wager few readers of this column can answer the question. Nor can Imran Khan, although—like the rest of us, its use comes naturally to him. [...]