July 2008
THE WORLD’S FIRST ANTI-DAM MOVEMENT, The Hindu
Some fifteen years ago, when the Narmada Bachao Andolan was at its height, the ecologist Madhav Gadgil told me about that movement’s forgotten predecessor. Back in the 1920s, the peasants of Mulshi Peta, near Pune, [...]
June 2008
THE NORTH-EAST AND THE NATION, The Telegraph
Earlier this year I spent ten days travelling through three states of north-eastern India. My journey began in Manipur, where, on my first night, I had dinner with a bunch of academics and journalists. The [...]
EXTREMISM THEN AND NOW, The Hindu
Six weeks after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the (then undivided) Communist Party of India held a party congress in Calcutta. The General Secretary of the CPI was P. C. Joshi, who was of the [...]
May 2008
HOW NOT TO FIGHT EXTREMISM, Hindustan Times
In the spring of 1990, a great Indian patriot, the liberal jurist V. M. Tarkunde, led a team of independent citizens on a study tour of the Kashmir Valley. Many cases of police and army [...]
THE TATTERED IDEAL, The Hindu
My friend T. R. Ramakrishna, a sportswriter and sports buff of an uncommon intelligence and senstivity, recently sent me a book published in the past which speaks directly to the present. The book is called [...]
WATCHING THE WATCHDOG, The Telegraph
The formal institutions of Indian democracy are not especially marked by the capacity for self-correction and self-criticism. One fact should make this clear—that no senior politician, civil servant, or judge has ever been successfully convicted [...]