There are moments in history that appear to drive wave after wave of people in a great torrent of catharsis, ecstasy, emotion and an elevated group mood that almost all conventional analysis, historical categories, moral measures and political prognosis seem beside the point. It would be foolish to deny that the pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What January 22 is, what it isn’t
Avay Shukla This last week has established that plumbing the depths of the ridiculous and the bizarre is not only our national pastime, it is also now the leitmotif of our society and ruling regime. The other day I decided I needed a “kurta”, not one of those fancy and expensive Myntra creations, but something… Read More Of Shankaracharyas and Cameracharyas
To accept that the spectacle about to be staged in Ayodhya can be extricated from politics is to sanctify the falsification of our living memory KAPIL KOMIREDDI There is no ritual that can sanitise the genesis of the temple that will be consecrated in Ayodhya on 22 January. It exists because the house of worship… Read More Ayodhya event not about Ram, but coronates Hindutva as state religion
“If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country.” — B.R. Ambedkar In a recent talk in Bengaluru, the writer, Parakala Prabhakar, made a perceptive observation about the changing language of political discourse. In the late 1980s, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was first becoming a… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Reign of faith
HARTOSH SINGH BAL The transformation of the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Sikhs embodies the problems the community faces in a climate where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s worldview prevails in the country. The story begins with a photo the Bharatiya Janata Party would once display with great pride, of a turbaned Modi disguised as… Read More Sikhs are the proverbial bone stuck in the RSS’s gullet
Jonathan Freedland Recall how counter-terrorist strategists had to rethink all that they knew when first confronted with suicide bombers. It’s hard to deter a terrorist who does not fear death. That’s true writ large for an organisation that has explicitly said it is “proud to sacrifice martyrs”. Not its own leaders, mind, many of whom live in… Read More Too many taking sides in this conflict miss the true nature of Hamas – and Netanyahu
War, we were learning slowly, is a terrible thing that turns men into beasts, women into zombies and children into scarred and introverted human beings for the rest of their lives… Mrinal Pande When in primary school, we did not know or care about the Partition. Why would neighbours suddenly begin resenting each other enough… Read More Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Really?
The driving out of peoples was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’: Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, commenting on the exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cited in R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans… Read More The Agony of Palestine
In dismissing concerns over the death of a Canadian Sikh activist, India’s prime minister raises more questions over his commitment to democracy… It is unclear where righteous indignation ends and purblind arrogance begins Observer editorial Political assassination is a practice as old as human society, although the term itself derives from the 12th-century Persian Order… Read More The Observer view on Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing: Narendra Modi’s hubris is ill-judged
NB: This essay was written nearly 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1984 carnage of Sikhs in New Delhi. It was my first attempt at arguing that communalism was India’s version of Nazism, and that it was a singular phenomenon with different religious (and mutually influential) expressions, rather than an arithmetical total of… Read More Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)
After the truth-shower 