Correspondence with Vladimir Kara-Murza In April 2023 the Russian opposition politician and human rights activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. He was found guilty of ‘running an ‘undesirable organization’, of ‘spreading falsehoods about the Russian army’ and of high treason – likely in connection with… Read More ‘Deep political changes are only a matter of time’
Germany is acclaimed for its efforts to atone for the Holocaust. But its method of repudiating the past has become a tool of exclusion… Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist… Read More Bad Memory
Dilip Simeon First posted on March 24, 2015 NB: This paper appeared in a volume entitled Communalism in Post-colonial India Changing Contours; by Mujibur Rehman (ed; 2015). I discuss why our understanding of communal politics is constrained from the outset by the faulty concepts we use, which only serve to re-inforce communal ideologies. DS The Philosophy of Number [1]… Read More The Philosophy of Number
How Hedgewar spurned Bose and his own protégé’s call to join the freedom struggle DHIRENDRA K JHA ON 7 JULY 1939, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was convalescing in the mansion of a rich colleague at Deolali, on the outskirts of Nasik, when an old associate visited him. This was Gopal Mukund Huddar, also known as Balaji. When… Read More The Great Betrayal
the spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord Tom Bunyard The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society.’ Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow… Read More History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
Reviewed by Aziz Rana Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (CUP, 2021) At the heart of the post-World War II international order was a legitimating narrative premised on the idea that the world system was no longer imperial; it had now become a community of equal states. This meant that international law established… Read More Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law
There are claims that the roots of democratic institutions can be found in ancient India. Studies have shown that such institutions have existed not only in India but also in other parts of the world. No one society can claim it was the ‘mother’.… There were two mutually contradictory strains in Western thought about India… Read More Was India the Mother of Democracy?
Mother of Cities to me / For I was born in her gate,Between the palms and the sea / Where the world-end steamers wait Rudyard Kipling, To the City of Bombay “Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot”: George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr.… Read More On Rudyard Kipling: by George Orwell (1942)
NB: Is India an empire? The British Raj certainly was, and the RSS/BJP ideologues who constantly denouce the Macaulay tradition in education; don’t seem to mind the continuance of colonial police codes and the divide and rule method of governance. Do they imagine that a combination of communal ideology and colonial policing will keep them… Read More Modi preaching peace abroad as Manipur burns reinforces historical alienation of the North East
By Richard Wolin Martin Heidegger’s influence has been enormous. Richard Rorty once justifiably claimed that it would be impossible to write the intellectual history of the 20th century without acknowledging Heidegger’s titanic impact. But these tributes to Heidegger’s prodigious achievements are question-begging in one crucial respect: they neglect to consider what we are actually reading when… Read More To Sanitize the Master’s Corpus: On the Heidegger Hoax
