Politics and Current Affairs – Page 18 – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

THEIR FIRST FAMILY AND OURS

The Telegraph

Driving down the Mall in Lahore, I saw a large poster mixing familiar faces with those that were less familiar. There was the current Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, wearing spectacles; next to him, but looming larger in the frame, his late wife Benazir Bhutto, her head covered with a chunni. Two others I recognized were [...]

CHAUVINISTS OF THE WORLD

UNITE!

In a recent essay in the Economic and Political Weekly, the political scientist Neil DeVotta quotes a Sri Lankan Government Minister as saying: ‘The Sinhalese are the only organic race of Sri Lanka. Other communities are all visitors to the country, whose arrival was never challenged out of the compassion of the Buddhists. But they must [...]

FOREIGN CERTIFICATES

The Hindu

I recently wrote a piece in a Delhi magazine about a Bangalore-based holy man lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the mails I received was one which enclosed, as proof of the holy man’s holiness, the English translation of an article in an obscure Finnish weekly which praised him and his works. My article had [...]

RENEWING THE POLICE

The Telegraph

On a sunny Sunday this past September, a friend and I were walking in central London, headed towards the south bank of the Thames. We were enjoying the scenery and the weather, when, at a road running along St. James’s Park, we came across thousands of men, women, and children on bicycles. So far as the [...]

THE TRIPLE TRAGEDY OF THE INDIAN MUSLIMS

The Telegraph

An influential editor from Delhi, visiting Bangalore, hosted a dinner for some local politicians, and invited me along. Among the netas present was the Karnataka Youth Congress president, the spokesman for H. D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular), and an office-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The conversation turned to the history of communal violence in [...]

TRIBAL TRAGEDIES

Hindustan Times

Fifty years ago, in October 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a short note explaining what the state’s policies towards the tribals of India should be. He urged that tribal rights in land and forest be protected, that tribal arts and culture be respected and renewed, that the tribals themselves be involved in their own administration (thus ‘we [...]

THE IMPURITY OF CULTURES

The Hindu

In the 1950s, inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru, some very brilliant young Indians went into the Foreign Service. Among them was the Rhodes scholar Peter Lynn Sinai. A former Ambassador to Austria and Iraq, Mr Sinai has now chosen to make his home in Bangalore. At a dinner recently, I got talking to him, to discover that [...]

THE NORTH-EAST AND THE NATION

The Telegraph

Earlier this year I spent ten days travelling through three states of north-eastern India. My journey began in Manipur, where, on my first night, I had dinner with a bunch of academics and journalists. The humour on display was black: it was aimed chiefly at the two agencies that between them control and dominate the Imphal [...]

HOW NOT TO FIGHT EXTREMISM

Hindustan Times

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 [...]

WATCHING THE WATCHDOG

The Telegraph

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 [...]