December 2015
Why Can’t The Congress Dump The Nehru-Gandhis, The Telegraph
In May 2014, General Elections were held in India as well as in the United Kingdom, the country whose electoral system we adopted as our own. In the UK, the Labour Party got 232 seats, [...]
Narendra Modi And The RSS,The Telegraph
Shortly after the 2014 Indian elections, I wrote that although the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was ‘an economic modernizer, in cultural terms he remains a prisoner of the reactionary (not to say medievalist) mind-set [...]
November 2015
Are We Becoming An Election Only Democracy?, Hindustan Times
For some time now, Indian democracy has been corroded by what the sociologist André Béteille terms ‘the chronic mistrust between government and opposition’. Parliament meets rarely— when it does, it resembles a dusty akhara more [...]
A Green and Pleasant Land, The Telegraph
Some twenty years ago, my wife and I called on Nirad Chaudhuri at his home in Oxford. The great little writer was happy to see us, but less pleased with my wife’s apparel. ‘That [chooridar [...]
October 2015
Why Gandhi Would Have Been Appalled By The “Gandhi-Mandela Trophy”, The Telegraph
India and South Africa have just concluded a five match one-day series for the ‘Gandhi-Mandela Trophy’. Next week, they will commence the first of four Tests for a trophy carrying the same name. When, back [...]
A 19th Century Politics For a 21st Century State, Hindustan Times
Some years ago, I edited an anthology of Indian political thought, profiling nineteen individual thinkers. The usual suspects—Gokhale, Tilak, Phule, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Lohia, JP, Periyar—featured, but also some less conventional choices. One of these [...]