Bharat Bhushan From Washington DC and Cairo to Paris and Abu Dhabi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the season’s flavour. However, the recurrent charge that his government is antithetical to India’s religious minorities hobbles his stride across the world stage. On the day he was guest of honour at France’s Bastille Day Parade, its premier… Read More Govt goes into pantomime mode to assuage foreign critics
Practically all of Argentina cried on this one… First posted June 08, 2015 NB: The generals who performed these barbarities were Catholics and received support from sections of the Church. But it must be said that their leftist opponents also received support from radical priests. A brief history of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, in which 30,000 people… Read More Uki Goñi – A grandmother’s 36-year hunt for the child stolen by the Argentinian junta
Iranian authorities have announced a new campaign to force women to wear the Islamic headscarf, as “morality police” returned to the streets 10 months after the death of a woman in their custody sparked nationwide protests. The morality police had largely pulled back after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September, as authorities struggled to contain… Read More Iran’s ‘morality police’ resume patrols 10 months after nationwide protests
A recent collection, The Call of the Tribe, explains why the Peruvian writer rejected the left and embraced the thinking of Friedrich Hayek and his ilk. JACK HANSON In a 1949 paper published in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, the liberal philosopher Sidney Hook described a certain species of mid-century intellectual who, having… Read More The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa
A World After Liberalism, a fascinating new book by Yale scholar Matthew Rose, considers the thought and influence of five thinkers beyond the political and academic mainstream who have played a significant role in establishing the intellectual framework for the movement, which Rose refers to as the ‘Radical Right’. Justin Reynolds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… Read More A World After Liberalism: the Radical Right and the dream of tradition
Will love, compassion, and care hold similar velocity to counter-mobilise rightwing Hindutva? Ajay Gudavarthy Democracies across the globe are undergoing a deep churning and we do not know, as yet, if this will eventually settle down into a more inclusive social equilibrium challenging old and conventional understanding of social change, or remain stuck as a… Read More India’s Silent Emotive Majority
the public is increasingly sceptical about the legal processes and their outcome. The press conference by four supreme court judges about the state of the apex court in 2018, the behaviour of former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi in the sexual harassment case against him, his eager acceptance of a Rajya Sabha nomination, the non-judicial rationalisations… Read More The political impact of Rahul Gandhi’s legal woes
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
Apoorvanand What happened to Professor Tejaswini Desai of Kolhapur can happen to anyone in the teaching community. It tells you of the perils of being a teacher in India of our times. Teachers can no longer assume that the class is over after the stipulated period of 55 or 60 minutes. Whatever transpired in the… Read More Witch-hunt against Tejaswini Desai highlights dangers of being a teacher in India today
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
After the truth-shower 