September 2005
VERDICTS ON PAKISTAN, The Hindu
In this column I have, from time to time, discussed forecasts about India’s future made by political commentators. This time I want to place before you two forecasts made about our great neighbour to the [...]
July 2005
LENINISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY, The Telegraph
In 1977, Left Fronts dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) came to power in the states of West Bengal and Kerala. A year later, the CPM leader B. T. Ranadive wrote a pungent [...]
BIGOTRY VS. BROADMINDEDNESS, The Telegraph
Can the BJP reconstitute itself as a sober, responsible, right-wing party, a party that respects tradition and order without necessarily advertising itself as ‘Hindu’? Put more directly, can it free itself of the RSS and [...]
June 2005
‘A BEASTLY PEOPLE…’ , The Hindu
In April 1919, a group of soldiers led by a man named Dyer fired at a crowd of unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Speaking in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill described [...]
May 2005
THE MERITS OF MARTYRDOM, The Hindu
This week forty-one years ago, I was hustled out of my school in the (then) little hill town of Dehradun to watch a helicopter land. In that age and place, vehicles that flew were rare [...]
THE BOMBAY-KARNATAK CONNECTION, The Hindu
The state of Karnataka is made up of three sections, each previously part of another political regime. There is ‘Old Mysore’, the districts in the south which once belonged to the princely state of that [...]