What the reports on the increase in India’s tiger population do not include
In a recent study conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India—affiliated with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change—the tiger population in the country’s reserves is recorded to have...
View ArticleThe Congress May Eschew Democratic Ideals in its Functioning, but It Isn’t...
In a rare display of defiance, one-time Congress loyalist and former environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan walked out of the party she had been closely associated with for three decades. While...
View ArticleWhy India’s Approach to Regulating GM Crops Is a Cause for Concern
On 29 January 2015, the Maharashtra government decided to take forward its decision to grant no objection certificates (NOCs) for field trials of five strains of genetically modified (GM) crops. Until...
View ArticleModi’s Insistence on the Land Ordinance is not Good Governance, It is an...
As opposition to the land ordinance mounts within and outside the parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has told his party MPs that there would be no rollback of the proposed amendments. While...
View ArticleHas India’s Left Diluted Its Own Discourse With Its Opposition to India’s...
Watching India’s Daughter—the BBC Storyville documentary currently in the eye of the storm—is not easy. For many of us who were on the streets of the national capital in that eventful winter of 2012 in...
View ArticleHaryana’s Decision to Include the Bhagavad Gita in School Curriculum Skews...
The next academic session will bring a change in curriculum for school students in Haryana, who will now have to study shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita as part of their syllabus. This move comes shortly...
View ArticleHow the Transformative Practice of Yoga has Gradually Been Drawn Into the...
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (compiled between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE) is the first text exclusively devoted to the philosophy of yoga. It is squarely based upon Samkhya, which...
View ArticleIt Doesn’t Matter If the Story was Planted, Four of Sushma Swaraj’s Tweets...
“Every few years,”’ I had reason to write in January 2013, “Sushma Swaraj is metaphorically given to losing her head. And she manages to do spectacularly enough to erase the image she manages to build...
View ArticleWhy Maulana Azad’s century-old defence of free thinking in Islam speaks...
Between February and May this year, three bloggers—Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman and Ananta Bijoy Das—were hacked to death in Bangladesh. All of them lost their lives to Islamic fundamentalists who see...
View ArticleThe Death of Yakub Memon Should Alert Us to the Birth of a New Republic
In the book Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right, edited by Wendy Doniger and Martha C Nassbaum, historian Mushirul Hasan talks about the first issue of the Encounter—a literary...
View ArticleTime for a “Diagnostic Test” on Rajiv Malhotra’s Books
In New Jersey, where Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American public intellectual, and I live as near neighbours in the town of Princeton, all vehicles—from clunkers to limos—have to undergo a periodic...
View ArticleThe Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Stupidity, techno-fantasies and the...
Seventy years ago, on 6 August 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, the United States of America decided to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima, a Japanese city. Three days later, on 9 August, the...
View ArticleIndia as a historical project: A failure of the imagination
Nations are defined by a shared sense of history; republics are defined by a shared sense of values. This vital distinction is often lost when liberals, conservatives and radicals—whether Sanghis or...
View ArticleMonarchy, Imperialism and Modernity: Munshi Premchand’s Unblinking Eye For Truth
Around two years ago, on 25 August 2013, my mother, a loyal reader of Jansatta—a Hindi daily—asked me to read a small piece in the editorial section of the newspaper. The piece in question was a...
View ArticleWhy Diplomatic Immunity in the Case of the Saudi Diplomat Raises Critical...
On 7 September 2015, two Nepalese women, aged 44 and 30, were rescued from an apartment in Gurgaon, where they had been held hostage for four months. These women had left Nepal in search of better...
View ArticleIn Punjab, it may not be clear what the protestors are fighting for but it is...
Punjab only comes to the attention of this republic during one of the periodic bursts of unrest in the state. For most of the time in between, the rest of the republic is content to nurture the myth of...
View ArticlePublic Intellectuals And the Growing Need to Speak Truth to Power
The Sahitya Akademi has finally come out and condemned the murder of writer MM Kalburgi and other rationalists, and has implicitly responded to the outcry over its silence on other incidents of...
View ArticleSubverting A Popular Movement: How The Sarbat Khalsa Was Hijacked By Radical...
Despite the Punjab government’s efforts to discourage people from assembling for the Sarbat Khalsa, a plenary meeting of the Khalsa—the collective body of the Sikhs—held on 10 November 2015 near Tarn...
View ArticleIs Anyone Willing To Take On The Perversion of Islam Caused By The...
On 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated militant attacks in Paris shook the world. The attacks, reportedly the deadliest in France since the Second World War, followed soon after many European...
View ArticleCould Justice Have Been Served For The Juvenile Accused of Jyoti Singh’s Rape?
Two days ago, on 22 December 2015, the Rajya Sabha passed a new Juvenile Justice Bill that effectively lowered the age of juveniles accused of heinous crimes from 18 to 16 years. The decision followed...
View ArticleThe challenge to Jaitley is a challenge to business as usual in Lutyens’ Delhi
Last week, on 23 December 2015, the Bharatiya Janata Party suspended Kirti Azad—the former cricketer and MP. Azad was suspended for defying the party’s orders and publicly raising the issue of...
View ArticleIt Is Becoming Clear That The SGPC No Longer Speaks For The Sikh Community
The Sikh jaikara, or slogan, “Jo bole so nihal, sat sri akal” is used in various situations. It means, “Whoever utters the following shall be fulfilled: truth is timeless.” Two parties are involved in...
View ArticleThe Focus on Religion in the 2011 Census Data Overshadows The Serious Impact...
On 27 December 2015, Union Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Giriraj Singh called for curbing the “uncontrolled growth” of population through a uniform policy. Singh said that the time had...
View ArticleIn The Aftermath of Rohith Vemula’s Tragic Death, We Would Do Well To Heed...
On 21 January 2016, addressing a packed hall of students and scholars at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, the French economist Thomas Piketty gave a talk in which he discussed the history of...
View ArticleHow television media uncritically reproduced the Sangh’s narrative of...
Over the course of this month, as the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), have been in combat with the government, a separate battle has raged within the media. This battle, fuelled by...
View ArticleThe Union Budget for 2016 is ideological, not financial
The Union Budget for 2016-17 has been questioned as being everything from a course correction, to a tactical move undertaken by a pragmatist, and even a conscious ideological shift to the left....
View ArticleThe Aadhaar Bill Is Yet Another Legislation That Leaves Too Much Power With...
On 11 March 2016, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefit & Services) Bill, 2016. The legislation, introduced by the finance minister Arun...
View ArticleThe question of Sehajdhari rights is also a question of Sikh identity
On 12 March 2016, much of the media coverage of the previous day’s Rajya Sabha session focused on the controversial Aadhaar Bill. While pundits and news organisations debated the many aspects of the...
View ArticleModi’s Chaiwallah Rhetoric Has No Place For Those That Grow The Chai
Kicking off his party’s election campaign in Assam on 25 March, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi conjured up one of his favourite electoral idioms—that of a tea seller. In his speech in Tinsukia,...
View ArticleThe wilful ignorance of a new generation of “Liberals” shields the Congress...
For some reason, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar recently deemed it fit to compare the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 with the killing of Muslims in 2002. Kanhaiya’s...
View ArticleBhagat Singh and the politics of nationalism
Bhagat Singh is one of the only national heroes, perhaps after Gandhi, who is venerated across India. This could be attributed to his appeal as a martyr, which cuts across political ideologies. If only...
View ArticleThe Denial of Rape by Soldiers in Kashmir by the Likes of Shekhar Gupta...
On 8 March 2016, celebrated internationally as Women’s Day, Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union, gave a speech in the university’s campus. Close to end of...
View ArticleThe BJP’s alliance with the AGP makes little sense but might be their key to...
On 7 September 2015, the union home ministry issued two orders that made changes to provisions in the Foreigners Order 1948 and the Passport (Entry into India) Rules 1950. These changes allowed...
View ArticleWhat the Gujarat Government’s decision to dictate PhD topics says about the...
In a bizarre case of government imposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Gujarat dispensation has drawn up a mandatory list of 82 topics that PhD students in state universities have to...
View ArticleHow the Election Commission oversteps its bounds during Election Season
On 14 May 2016, electoral officials in Tamil Nadu seized around Rs 570 crore in cash in Tirupur district. State Bank of India officials had to come forward with documents to prove that the money was...
View ArticleDefamation: Where the Supreme Court Got It Wrong
What do Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi and Subramanium Swamy have in common? As much as this question seems like the hook to a bad joke, these three politicians (along with 21 others) came together to...
View ArticleTeaching at the Right Level: The Government’s New Education Policy Must...
In January 2016, the non-governmental organisation, Pratham Education Foundation and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which is headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of...
View ArticleWithout a court-monitored CBI investigation, Jaitley will never be held...
On 22 January 2015, the Supreme Court appointed a committee comprising Justice RM Lodha, the former chief justice of India, and two other former judges of the Supreme Court. The court tasked the...
View ArticleKashmiri Pandits don’t have to be flag-bearers of the Indian state
On 15 August 2016, the police in Bengaluru registered a first information report against the human-rights organisation Amnesty International India under various sections of the Indian Penal Code,...
View ArticleWho should play Irom Sharmila in a Bollywood blockbuster?
The end of the epic 16-year fast by the activist Irom Sharmila Chanu on 9 August should make the Indian government heave a sigh of relief. Her repeated arrests over the years should have embarrassed...
View ArticleWhat the New Enemy Property Bill says about Indian Citizenry
On 7 January 2016, the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, promulgated an ordinance amending the Enemy Property Act of 1968. The Enemy Property Validation and Amendment Bill, 2016 is currently under...
View ArticleThe demon of terror lies within, and is being fed by those in power
It is difficult to imagine that in late September, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi challenged Pakistan to a war against poverty, a host of commentators were praising his strategic restraint. A few...
View ArticleThe Undemocratic Regime of Jayalalithaa: Why Claims of Amma’s Feminist Legacy...
Since late 2015, if not longer, the health of the late J Jayalalithaa—the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and the erstwhile head of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—had been the subject...
View ArticleThe Assertion of Kannada Should Not Suppress Karnataka’s Linguistic...
If languages were allotted characters as per their position in socio-political discourse, then Hindi has often assumed the role of a villain in south India. Ever since states were carved on linguistic...
View ArticleThe RSS’s Reliance on Lal-Bal-Pal to Justify Its Own Cultural Nationalism...
In early August, in his last speech as vice president, Hamid Ansari noted that in contrast to a “pluralist view of nationalism” that prevailed for decades after Independence, “an alternative viewpoint...
View ArticleThe Hadiya Case Represents the Crossroads Between a Sociological Trend of...
On 30 October, the Supreme Court directed that Hadiya, a 25-year-old Malayali woman whose conversion to Islam and choice of a partner who shared her faith is under judicial scrutiny, be brought before...
View ArticleWhy the BCCI’s Committee of Administrators Should Encourage Independent...
The news about cricket administration in India appears similar to that of a family-run business being dragged, kicking and screaming, towards professional management. In 2013, the Supreme Court...
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