April 2005
WHERE LEFT MEETS RIGHT, The Telegraph
Earlier this year, I was at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where I had been asked to given an after-dinner talk to the students. I reached ten minutes before schedule, so my hosts [...]
STUNG BY THE WEST, The Telegraph
Back in the 1850s, Karl Marx wrote a series of essays on the results of British rule in India. These essays were marked by an ambivalence that was uncharacteristic as well as profound. On the [...]
March 2005
PUNJAB PAST AND PRESENT, The Hindu
I first visited Punjab in the summer of 1973, to play a cricket match in Patiala. Later that same year occurred an event of some significance in the history of Punjab and India. In October [...]
January 2005
DEFACING THE MAHATMA, The Hindu
On 30th January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a right-wing fanatic named Nathuram Godse. The act shamed most Indians—but not all. For there has always been a significant minority who have been on the [...]
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 FORGOTTEN PRIME MINISTER, The Hindu
Debates may rage on who was India’s best Prime Minister, but there can be no question of who has been its most unjustly forgotten Prime Minister: Lal Bahadur Shastri. This remains so even in this, [...]