Politics and Current Affairs reproduces writings on secularism, majoritarianism, diversity, and other contentious themes in contemporary India.
I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association, and I live down the road from the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Yet when the opening game of this year’s Indian Premier League was played there last week, I was at home, not watching the action on television, but reading a recently published book on cricket, albeit about [...]
I recently came across a book with the intriguing title, Lenin and Gandhi. Its author was the Austrian writer René Fülöp-Miller. The book was published originally in French; what I read was the English translation, published in 1927. Back in the 1920s, a book-length comparison between Gandhi and Lenin made eminent sense. The two men were [...]
Ever since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in May 2014, the BJP and the RSS have loudly proclaimed their ambition to make our country a ‘Vishwa-Guru’—Teacher to the World. With every passing month, however, they seem ever further from realizing this ambition. However, whatever our failures in international politics, in the sphere of international cricket India [...]
In August 2015—almost exactly ten years ago—I visited the Kashmir Valley, and spoke to a cross-section of people from different walks of life. One of them was the journalist Shujaat Bukhari. In January 2015 I had bumped into Bukhari in a Delhi bookshop, and he urged me to visit his home state. When I turned up [...]
In early June, the senior Congress leader, Jairam Ramesh, began using the hashtag, Emergency@11, in his daily posts charging the Modi Government with various errors, mistakes and crimes. This was in anticipation of what Ramesh knew would come later in the month; namely, the Prime Minister’s invocation of the 50th anniversary of the Emergency imposed by [...]
Growing up in the India of the 1970s I had ambivalent feelings towards America. I admired some of their writers (Ernest Hemingway was a particular favourite) and adored the music of Bob Dylan and Mississippi John Hurt. On the other hand, I was just about old enough to remember—and never forget—how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger [...]
No term in Indian public discourse is as egregiously misleading as ‘national media’. For the newspapers, magazines and TV channels that come under this rubric have a narrow, blinkered, view of the nation they claim to represent. They see India from the National Capital Region, and often from the NCR alone. Their geographical proximity to power [...]
Many years ago, while working on a social history of sport, I came across some news reports of a Test match played in Lahore in 1955. The cricket itself was boring in the extreme. It was one of five draws in a five-match series between India and Pakistan, with runs scored at less than two an [...]
Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is, that Man was vile. B. R. Ambedkar, speaking to the Constituent Assembly of India, November 1948 The Indian Constitution came into force on 26th [...]
Shortly before he demitted office as Prime Minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh said that history would judge him more generously than the media was then doing. Now, reading the outpouring of adulatory tributes to Singh after his passing, this historian is led to wonder—are these eulogies altogether merited? Was he the wise, all-knowing, and apparently flawless [...]