In 1997, when I arrived at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University to study history, the Bharatiya Janata Party was on the rise. The party had formed a 13-day government in 1996 and was widely anticipated to be on the cusp of power. On campus, however, it was Marxism that dominated discussions. A number of left organisations had student branches in the… Read more →
Villagers near the site of crime at Katra Shahadatganj village where two sisters were gangraped and hanged from a tree, in Badaun district on Saturday The images of two innocent Dalit girls hanging from a tree in Katra village in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh and a crowd of spectators looking bewildered at them best describes our national character. We… Read more →
Guest Post : P.A.D.S. (Peoples’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism) Statement on Elections The Loksabha election results of 2014 surprised everyone. They are beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ardent BJP and Modi supporters, and worse than the worst scenarios imagined by BJP’s political opponents. Even though these elections results are singularly stunning, phenomena like these have diverse… Read more →
Neelanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a much discussed book on Modi, made few interesting observations about AAP’s (Aam Aadmi Party ) foray into the electoral politics of Gujarat. Underlining the fact that Kejriwal’s entry into the state – wherein he tried to put the government on the mat for its acts of omission and commission – did raise expectations, he maintains… Read more →
Mohan Bhagwat brings a resurgent Sangh to the cusp of political power IN EARLY AUGUST LAST YEAR, a cohort of journalists gathered in Kolkata for a two-day seminar on Islamic fundamentalism convened by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the world’s largest non-political voluntary organisation and the eighty-eight-year-old bedrock of Hindu nationalism in India. This was the first time the RSS, also… Read more →
Narendra Modi was enacting a symbolic crusade in Varanasi, remapping history as he retraced the landmarks of a city. In mapping space, he was reclaiming history, the rejected or slighted history of a nation Politics is often a symbolic domain, where the grammar of a world and its historic logic are played out for a nation to watch. On April… Read more →
The BJP has been clamouring for the de-recognition of AAP for its ‘anarchism’ and its lack of faith in institutions put in place by the Constitution, but faced with the sting by Cobrapost on its own responsibility for the Babri Masjid demolition, its only response is that the Election Commission should stop its broadcast in view of the elections. In… Read more →
Everything now points to the BJP emerging as the single largest party, by some distance, in the sixteenth Lok Sabha. But the Modi-led alliance will not go into the mid-2014 ‘finals’ as the favourite, in any event not the overwhelming favourite The results of the four State Assembly elections conducted in November-December 2013 in northern India confirm one thing: the… Read more →
The BJP president Rajnath Singh has condemned English language and lauded Sanskrit .The statement deserves the criticism it has met. However, critics of such statements often have a very narrow perspective. The real issue with regard to language is that the regional languages are criminally neglected in India and similar is the trend in many other developing countries. This is… Read more →
The feeling of pride that communities have in their own identities is being slowly converted into a feeling of hatred for other communities, and their narratives of self-respect are being replaced by narratives of violence against other communities” The idea of communalism is not a mere idea of violence and extinction of human lives from existence that take place now… Read more →