/Tag: ambedkar

The Moral Evolution of Mohandas K Gandhi


The Telegraph

The American writer Louis Fischer is best known for his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which Richard Attenborough drew upon while making his award-winning film of 1982. Fischer’s book was published in 1949, a year after Gandhi’s assassination. Seven years previously, he had written a much slimmer (and now far less well known) volume entitled [...]

The Fourth Crisis of The Republic


Hindustan Times

As I have written before, if India had been a start-up in August 1947 not even the most venturesome of venture capitalists would have invested in it. No new nation was born in more inhospitable circumstances. The Partition of the country had been awful enough, in the scale of its violence and the mass displacement of [...]

The Rise And Fall Of The Term ‘Harijan’


The Telegraph

In his 1984 book The Untouchable as Himself, the anthropologist R. S. Khare speaks of the derision with which Dalits viewed the term ‘Harijan’, popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. Khare quotes a Chamar reformer in Lucknow as telling him: ‘Harijan means what we can never be allowed to become by the caste Hindu, and what we may [...]

Indians Great Greater Greatest?


The Hindu

I... Nations need heroes, but the construction of a national pantheon is rarely straightforward or uncontested. Consider the debate in the United States about which faces should adorn the national currency. The founding figures of American Independence—Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin—are all represented on the dollar bill, albeit on different denominations. So are the 19th [...]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIPARTISANSHIP


Hindustan Times

When the politician-social worker Nanaji Deshmukh died last month, none of the obituaries mentioned what may have been his finest moment. This occurred during a debate in the Rajya Sabha in the first week of May 2002. The subject being discussed was the recent Gujarat riots. As members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress [...]

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS


Caravan

Not long ago, I found myself in a panel discussion on television with three politicians. One was a Congress Member of Parliament, a second an MP from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the third the President of one of the smaller regional formations. In the course of the conversation I found reason to criticize the three netas [...]

SYCOPHANTS AND DEMOCRATS


The Telegraph

One day in the nineteen seventies, Leonid Brezhnev was in a town on Lake Baikal, attending a Politburo meeting. The Soviet Union was in its pomp, whereas the rival superpower was scarred at home by the scandal of Watergate, and abroad by the experience of defeat in Vietnam. Contemplating these events, Brezhnev was naturally feeling very [...]

THE LOCALITY AND THE NATION


The Hindu

On Independence Day this year I was driving from Bangalore to the small temple town of Melkote. At traffic lights within the city we were hailed by vendors selling the National Flag. When we got to the highway, we passed boys on motor bikes waving the tiranga jhanda. Clearly, the Supreme Court order allowing private citizens [...]