Politics and Current Affairs – Page 20 – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

LONG DISTANCE NATIONALISMS

The Telegraph

A friend from Sri Lanka recently visited Bangalore, and not unexpectedly was in a mood of dark depression. The always uneasy cease-fire between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam and the Sri Lankan Government had broken down. Civil war had resumed. Once more, bombs were going off in the heart of Colombo; once more, the Army [...]

PUBLIC OFFICE

PRIVATE GAIN

‘Public service’ is now a less-than-clean word, associated in the middle-class mind with corruption and nepotism. It was not always so. One of my abiding childhood memories is of opening the door on a winter evening to Bhawani Singh, a peon who worked in the Forest Research Institute. A Garhwali from the Pindari ghati, it was [...]

REGIONALISM AND THE REPUBLIC

The Telegraph

The recent attacks on Bihari labourers by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) are criminal acts, and deserve to be treated as such by the security forces, and by the people of Assam. But they also need to be viewed historically, as an undoubtedly perverted manifesation of a popular sentiment that has existed since the [...]

BASTAR THEN AND NOW

The Hindu

At about the time of the Battle of Britain, an Englishman of combatant age made a new home with his new wife in a then very remote, and very forested, princely state named Bastar. The man was Verrier Elwin, a brilliant Oxford scholar who had joined the Church and then left it, apprenticed himself to Gandhi [...]

CHOLBÉ NA!

The Telegraph

In Marginal Men, his fine history of refugee politics, Prafulla Chakrabarti recounts how Kolkata acquired its by now well founded reputation as a city of protests and protesters. To demand fair compensation and citizenship rights, writes Chakrabati, the leaders of the movement aimed to throw ‘regimented bands of refugees in the streets of Calcutta and to [...]

CONSCIENCE OF THE NATION

The Hindu

There are basically two kinds of autobiographies. The first kind lays bare the individual self, speaking in detail—sometimes too much detail—about the autobiographer’s life, loves, conquests and failures. The second kind seeks to subordinates the life to the times, using individual experience to illuminate wider social trends and processes. In the Indian context, Gandhi’s autobiography might [...]

A MANAGED MEDIA

The Telegraph

Being an old-fashioned kind of guy, brought up in an old-fashioned sort of home, I came to believe that the duties of a newspaper were to inform, educate, and entertain. It was about a decade ago that I first learnt that, for large sections of the English-language media, these three duties had been superseded by or [...]

THE SOCIOLOGY OF RESERVATION

The Telegraph

The announcement that reservation for OBCs is to be extended to IITs and IIMs has provoked much debate in the press. Critics say the move will undermine the functioning of these institutions by devaluing the principle of merit. Cynics add that the announcement was a consequence of the HRD Minister’s wish to outstage and embarrass the [...]

THE POLITICS OF PERSONALITY

The Telegraph

In her early years as Congress President, Sonia Gandhi was treated as a political lightweight, by her opponents and independent commentators alike. Her public persona exuded diffidence. She spoke English inadequately. Her Hindi was worse. Her command of both languages was made more imperfect by the thick Italian accent in which the words were couched (and [...]

LOVE AND HATE BEFORE THE AGE OF BUSH

The Telegraph

For most of its career as an independent nation, India has not had the happiest relations with the United States. In the words of the historian Denis Kux, these have been two ‘estranged democracies’. The causes of the estrangement were various—America’s enchantment with India’s enemy, Pakistan; India’s affection for America’s enemy, the Soviet Union; the self-righteousness [...]