August 2025
Vishwa-Bully, The Telegraph
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 [...]
July 2025
Justice for the Kashmiris, The Telegraph
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 [...]
June 2025
Modi vs Indira, The Telegraph
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 [...]
May 2025
My Debt to the American University, The Telegraph
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 [...]
April 2025
The Great Nicobar Planned Disaster, The Telegraph
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 [...]
February 2025
Lahore Past and Present, The Telegraph
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 [...]