Politics and Current Affairs – Page 19 – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

THE RISE AND FALL OF INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM

Hindustan Times

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 [...]

TOWARDS A GENDER-SENSITIVE CIVIL CODE

Hindustan Times

Article 44 of the Constitution of India reads: ‘The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India’. The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the first Law Minister, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, were both modernists who wished to reform archaic personal laws and bring them [...]

SELECTIVE RIGHTEOUSNESS

The Telegraph

A mail arrived in my Inbox last week, as part of a circular sent to many people with some connection to the press. Addressed to ‘the Chief Editor/ Photographer’, it read: ‘We request you to cover the demonstration that AIDWA is organizing against the violence perpetrated on a (sic) tribal women in Assam at 1.30 pm [...]

THE KLEPTOCRAT AND THE DEMOCRAT

The Telegraph

In September I was in the United States, travelling around the cities of the East Coast. The exiled Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto had been there a few weeks previously, visiting the same cities and frequently speaking at the same venues (albeit to much larger and more interested audiences). Besides academics and policy makers, Ms Bhutto also [...]

RECALLING AN EARLIER FAILURE

The Telegraph

On my first trip to New York—back in the mid 1980s—I made a visit to the United Nations, an institution then held in somewhat higher esteem than it is now. In the plaza outside a demonstration was in progress. The protesters were Afghan men, their nationality manifest in their dress—they wore flowing pyjamas, a long loose [...]

DEGREES OF DEGRADATION

The Telegraph

In recent years, there has been a sharp decline in standards of political debate in India. In and out of Parliament, issues concerning the public good are rarely discussed logically or dispassionately. The arguments more often reflect ideological prejudice or personal hostility rather than rational thought. The degradation has been palpable for some time now; but [...]

SMALL STATE

LARGE NATION

Goa is the youngest part of India, having joined the Union only in December 1961. It is the smallest state in the country; one can drive across it in less than a day. It is one of the least populous, having less than two million people. And it is one of the most interesting. The culture [...]

TWO CHEERS FOR BLASPHEMY

Hindustan Times

How one reads the protests by the Governments of Iran and Pakistan at Salman Rushdie being made a knight depends on where one is placed on the political spectrum. Those who incline to the right might dismiss it as yet another illustration of the illiberalism of Islam. On the other hand, some on the left might [...]

POWER WOMEN OF NORTH AND SOUTH

The Telegraph

The day the U. P. election results came in I was having lunch with a friend in Mumbai. ‘Mayawati appears to be the Jayalalithaa of the South’, he said, before passing on to other matters. But his remark stayed with me; the more I thought about it, the more the comparison made sense. Mayawati and Jayalalithaa [...]

WHO IS A PATRIOT?

The Telegraph

The novelist U. R. Anantha Murthy has long objected to the characterization of the Sangh Parivar as the ‘saffron brigade’. Saffron is a beautiful colour, the colour of renunciation, worn by monks and others of great and good character. Why should we cede it so easily to a bunch of bigots? To me, at any rate, [...]