For politicians it is the political dividend that matters most, rather than the development of the country. The ruling Congress party, wary of a reversal of fortunes in the forthcoming polls, has played with the sentiments of the people of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. The party has effectively used the issue of classical language and Telangana statehood to cat...
I am a great fan of Kiev, an affable city of pleasing bourgeois character, with its plentiful small restaurants, clean tree-lined streets, and bonhomie of its beer gardens. A hundred years ago Kiev was predominantly a Russian resort, and some central areas have retained this flavour. Now Kiev is patrolled by armed thugs from the Western Ukraine, by fighters ...
Russian president Vladimir Putin behaves like a groom at his wedding feast in the midst of gang warfare: he tries to attend to his bride and disregard the gunshots, with less and less success. His wedding party is the Olympic Games, a sports event that occupies him immensely; meanwhile his house is under attack from all directions. In the Ukraine, a confront...
‘Hindu terrorism’ maybe the UPA’s grand denouement. The Congress’s most maligned monster got a clean chit in the riots of 2002; his Minister of State for Home was not named in the CBI chargesheet in the Ishrat Jehan encounter case; and nemesis is now hunting their former prosecutrix. Now, Army intelligence officer Lt Col Prasad Purohit, arrested in a...
The director of a reputed cultural institution based in Chennai narrated this interesting encounter she had with an American Swami of ISKCON. During a visit to Bombay, the director was impressed to see an American living a devout Vaishnava lifestyle as an ordained Hindu monk of ISKCON. Two years later, when the director was on a tour of the US, he bumped...
ayalalithaa has stirred up the Nation’s conscience by her move to release the Rajiv killers! Before telling why, I wish to express my surprise at how people – including those in TV debates did not see some basic facts in this issue. Technically speaking, all that Jayalalithaa did was to have seized upon the suggestion the Supreme Court verdict had given tha...
DefExpo’14 (February 6-9) is over. For the last time, AK Antony, the longest serving Defence minister of India, addressed the Defence Expo. The response to the Expo was expected to be dull, but no one in his wildest imagination had expected it to be so dreary. The Ministry statistics in fact suggested a growth in the number of participating firms, which mean...
Thousands of years of Indian agriculture is now facing its biggest crisis. The country where goddess Annapurna is worshipped has been witnessing suicides by farmers in droves for the last two decades. Under British rule, mass famines were caused by design, causing millions of starvation deaths, but even in that era farmers alone were not forced to commit sui...
On Jan. 28, delivering his fifth State of the Union message, an annual ritual in Washington, President Barack Obama glided swiftly over the 12 year-old war in Afghanistan, telling us: “More than 60,000 of our troops have already come home from Afghanistan. With Afghan forces now in the lead for their own security, our troops have moved to a support role. Tog...
The one distinguishing feature of the IITs till now was their respect for merit and the atmosphere of free thinking which these institutions encouraged. Many an alumnus of the IITs will look back fondly not merely for the academic training it provided, but more for the exposure these campuses give through their wide circle of co-curricular activities. This...
The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the world took an interesting twist this week [Feb 11]. Last week we discussed what appeared to be a significant shift in German national strategy in which Berlin seemed to declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in the world – a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine. This we...
At the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) at Hawaii in the spring of 2011, Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), and scholarship was critiqued at a Roundtable Panel organized and chaired by Dr. Madan Lal Goel, University of West Florida. The panelists included Dr. Bharat Gupt, Delhi University, and Dr...
The Portuguese while pursuing a policy of destruction and plunder of Buddhist Temples held out various inducements for Buddhists to convert to Christianity. Conversion meant a sure means of exemption from taxes due to the Government. For example, Christians were exempt from the marala (death duties). This meant that they could leave the entirety of their pro...
Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), is an almost unbelievably obtuse work of 700+ pages. After a first read-skim in 2009, I summed it up thus: “A work equaled in its confusion, incomprehension and malice perhaps only by John Mills’ History and Katherine Mayo’s Mother...
Western nations, led by the European Union and the Obama Administration, are backing an outright neo-Nazi regime-change coup in Ukraine. If the effort succeeds, the consequences will extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine and neighboring states. For Russia, such a coup would constitute a casus belli, coming as it does in the context of NATO missile defense...
Last week, in an important interview with the media, Raghuram Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said that if vegetable prices are controlled, the nation’s economy would be on the right track. What has the Reserve Bank to do with vegetable prices? The UPA government is about to close shop and winds of change and political turmoil are visibly seen....
While harsh words and epithets are being exchanged between Beijing and Tokyo, which could develop at any point into a military conflict, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a December 2012 landslide victory in the Lower House of Japan’s Parliament, is riding high on the early results of his economic stimulus. But ...
The selective violence against Sikhs in 1984 is a festering sore in the national psyche and despite scrupulous collection of facts by eminent citizens from victims and witnesses, no justice has been done. Numerous reports have found that the violence was not spontaneous, as claimed by the authorities, but organised by important politicians of the ruling...
Racism, the notion that some races, notably the White, are inherently superior to darker skinned and Jewish people was acceptable in academic discourse until the end of World War II. Following the Nazi horrors and the American Civil Rights Movement race is now a dirty word. This does not mean that racial prejudices have been eradicated like, say, polio. Some...
Kashmir is a blot on the post-Independence history of India. It is an example of everything that is wrong with our political, strategic and civilisational understanding of our nationhood as the Kashmir issue is associated with all aspects of what defines a nation-state. The Indian polity has subsequently realised that Jawaharlal Nehru made a self-goal and th...
Judging from media reports, India has a BIG problem with rape. No other country seems to come even close. All over the globe “another rape in India” is reported ever so often. On my last visit to Germany, I jolted when on 27 December 2013 the most popular TV news ended with “another gang rape in India”. It was one of only five topics of the 15 minutes...
Myths are integral to any culture; they give life and vibrancy to the cultures in which they are created. Philosopher-historian Peter Munz observed, “Myths and their motifs invariably constitute the leaven of the weltanschauung of a culture and permeate its fabric and identity in the way matter and form inform the world of reality. But like matter again myth...
PR: First, we would like to thank you for joining us. I understand you spent nearly three decades in the Indian Armed Forces and salute you for that and would like to ask how you started and if you can describe your journey entering the Intelligence Services of India (Intelligence Corps), more so become the Chief, which is extremely difficult to...
Imagining categories of people: The world has been witness to devastations caused by racism as a theory, resulting in the massacres of millions of innocent people. It was assuming the racial superiority of redheads and imagining an entire community (Jew) as hate symbols that horrendous genocides and holocausts have been perpetrated in engineered mass hyster...
The recent protests in Ukraine have the stench of a foreign-orchestrated attempt to destabilize the government of Viktor Yanukovych after he walked away from signing an EU Association Agreement that would have driven a deep wedge between Russia and Ukraine. Glamor-star boxer-turned political guru, Vitaly Klitschko, has been meeting with the US State...
A few months ago, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was expected to sign some agreements that could eventually integrate Ukraine with the European Union economically. Ultimately, Yanukovich refused to sign the agreements, a decision thousands of his countrymen immediately protested. The demonstrations later evolved, as they often do. Protesters started c...
Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Admi Party (AAP) fooled Delhi by making many false promises, one of which was reduction in electricity charges. Soon after coming to power he announced rate cut but equivalent amount of subsidy to the distribution companies [Discoms] assuring them abnormal profit. Since then he has been silent on electricity and water. He never ha...
With the recent calls to rewrite history, there is no better a time than now to bring out all the hard facts that have been hidden or buried (pun intended). Every time the topic of colonial atrocities is brought forward for debate, the quick response is to claim these as history and push to the background the crimes committed in the name of peaceful coexiste...
The Indian general election scheduled for May 2014 would, if the forecasts are proved to be correct, result in a sea change in India’s relationship with the rest of the world as well as a revolutionary transformation of her economy, industry and education if the changes introduced in Gujarat by Chief Minister Narendra Modi are an indication. It will also dra...