Bharat Bhushan The airing of part one of a BBC documentary “India: The Modi Question” has raised political hackles in India. It suggests that the then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi was directly responsible for the riots, which left 2,000 people dead, mostly Muslims. It has since been taken down from YouTube and other social media… Read More Gujarat riots documentary: BBC’s motives are less clear
First posted November 01, 2014 The violent events of 1984 signify the breakdown of consensual politics and the ideal of composite Indian nationhood. When communal animosity spreads across society, it corrodes the social conscience and (directly or subliminally) produces a genocidal consensus. In the aftermath of 1984 we also witnessed the decay of a reliable… Read More The Broken Middle
Jeremy Corbyn Hell is a teargassed scrubland crawling with infectious disease. Hell is toddlers scavenging to survive. Hell is a refugee camp in Calais. Each time I visit, I learn more about the diabolical conditions that human beings are forced to endure in the camp. Having fled the horrors of war, environmental disaster and destitution, refugees… Read More If you ever doubt the hateful effects of Tory migrant policy, go to Calais and see what I’ve seen
Yvonne Roberts After police officer David Carrick’s conviction on 51 charges of rape and domestic abuse, the Met announced it was reviewing a further 1,633 cases of domestic and sexual abuse involving more than 800 officers. Every police force in England and Wales is reviewing allegations of domestic and sexual abuse relating to officers dating back a decade. Potentially,… Read More Can victims of crime hope for justice from a crumbling system?
First posted October 21, 2011 The law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief. Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is not The mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas or, say, five men or, possibly six. In the end, these… Read More Wallace Stevens and the ‘Academy of fine ideas’
First posted February 01, 2019 The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism: by Mark Edmundson Reviewed by Jonathan Derbyshire What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud, on the burning of his books by the… Read More The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism
John Harris You may not have heard of Nat Wei, AKA Lord Wei of Shoreditch. Until very recently, the 46-year-old Conservative peer – ennobled by David Cameron, for whom he once did some work on the concept of the “big society” – had certainly escaped my attention. But when he published a brief article on the activist… Read More Ludicrous ideas, perpetual scandal: British Conservatives are in absolute freefall
Truth, and the memory of truth, are public enemy number one for authoritarian governments today. The most relentless Swachh Bharat programme has been a campaign against Sachh Bharat. Mitali Saran The guiding principle of the Modi government is ‘If you can’t fix it, bury it.’ Information is power, so suck up as much of it… Read More One nation, one version
SUCHET VIR SINGH Param Vir Chakra recipient Captain Bana Singh (retd) joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as the Bharat Jodo Yatra entered Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Friday. Referring to Captain Singh as the “Param Vir Chakra recipient who hoisted the Tricolour on Siachen’s icy heights”, Gandhi took to Twitter to post a picture of himself walking beside… Read More Param Vir Chakra recipient Capt Bana Singh joins Bharat Jodo Yatra
URMI CHANDA A lot of literary writing recognised as peace literature is retrospective, as few writers set out with the intention to write about peace. However, in a couple of new releases, the intention is rather palpable. Sahana Ahmed’s Amity, which released in December 2022, is an anthology of 95 poems by 47 writers from France,… Read More Peace literature is the new boom in South Asia
After the truth-shower 