Nehruvian secularism gave minorities many privileges. Modi’s BJP has redefined it using Triple Talaq Today’s intellectual and philosophical polarisation (I have carefully excluded “political”) over the ongoing campaign to abolish triple talaq for the Muslim women is a more complex story than the Supreme Court hearings or the usual TV “debates” would suggest. The starkest...
Demonetisation is Modi’s make-or-break gambit for 2019. Opposition leaders see a vulnerability and won’t gift pre-eminence to Congress What is to explain the recent actions of our most prominent Opposition leaders? Why has Mamata Banerjee suddenly gone to war with the Centre? Why is Arvind Kejriwal behaving as if the immediate battle has shifted from...
The people caught most unprepared by the PM’s strike on currency are the bureaucrats. The problem: They’ve been there, done that The headline of this week’s National Interest doesn’t suffer from a mischievous typo. Nor do I claim to be inventing that expression. It isn’t even a cheap, but tempting, pun on the way true...
India is complacent if not complicit as in 1975-77. Dangers are bigger now as we have a clear external enemy, strong economy & feckless opposition In this season of alternative histories, is it possible to script one for the Emergency? It was the darkest period in the history of independent India and people refused to...
GM is already in our food chain for years. The approval for indigenous GM mustard should put fake fearmongering to rest If you want to see how some of the issues most vital to us and our future generations are debated in a vacuum — of facts —please take a short journey with me to...
Why BJP can’t realize its dream of uniting with culture (Hindutva) what sociology (caste) divided All national parties claim to oppose casteism but indulge in it. None has also been able to get its caste equations right, in terms of its larger leadership and appeal. But no national political force has been as confounded by caste as...
We are erring in taking a one-dimensional view of Brexit by limiting our concerns to its implications for financial markets. Its political fallout can be way more far-reaching and serious In these angry times it challenges the very basis of the modern, democratic state evolved over the centuries. There is a fashionable new clamour for...
Pakistan is a classical national security state which needs to be constantly at war with somebody, ultimately resulting in it waging war on itself and its own people The late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto once famously promised to fight a 1,000-year war with India. In the summer of 1990, his daughter Benazir repeated the same call....
Let’s be honest. There is much revulsion in India over the mass slaughter in Peshawar. There is sympathy for Pakistan. But it is also laced with some servesyou-right schadenfreude, a little bit of I-told-you-so and the inevitable: will you still keep rearing snakes in your backyard hoping they will bite only your neighbours? This complex...
The BJP-led NDA will fight elections together and we will have a common minimum programme (CMP). We will sit together and decide what our CMP will be and then present it to the people. If our allies say that no CMP is required and every party that is a component of the NDA can go...