WILL THE EUPHORIA REMAIN ?
Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that…
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Governor’s Disgrace
EIGHTEEN hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in…
Letter from the Editor
There can be little more excitement for the media than to chronicle political events from inception to climax. Opportunities tend to be rare, but as…
WIDOW OF INDIRA GANDHI ASSASSIN SET TO ENTER INDIA PARLIAMENT
23 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited CHAMKAUR SAHIB, India, Nov 23, Reuter – Long before Bimal Kaur Khalsa’s motorcade churns into…
THE JANATA PARTY – Will It, Won’t It, Will It, Won’t It Split?
The Janata Party will soon split. The Janata Party has always been a loose coalition. The Janata Party’s constituents have view-points and ambitions that differ…
The Dauphin and the Figurehead
Timing is everything, and with a number of state elections soon, leading to the general election next year, cynicism and opportunism are manifest. The Congress-led…
INDIA : Return To Normalcy
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will…
MRS GANDHI Vs. THE CHALLENGERS
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too,…
THE NEW DEAL IN NEW DELHI
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political…
Bahuguna’s Blitz
If Politics is the art of deception, the Congress(I) symbolises its highly developed state. After crying itself hoarse about its inability to conduct the Garhwal …
Signs Of The Times
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man…
Spoil Of Sycophancy
For all those journalists who think they belong to a thankless and poorly-paid profession, there is hope on the horizon. It comes from the latest…
Faith, Hope And No Charity
The International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) began with a bang: the National Federation of the Blind led its members in a vociferous agitation in…
Laldenga’s War-Dance
Events In Mizoram seems to be moving Inexorably towards a resumption of Insurgency The cease-fire agreement, which came into effect at midnight on July 31…
Friend in Need
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…
Uttar Pradesh – Peace of The Graveyard
I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is. Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be…
Ends of Justice
Gauhati and Jorhat and small batches people took out processions in protest against the decision to hold the elections. Even political parties opposed to the…
The Bhajan Bludgeon
The Sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught.…
Taken For A Ride
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have…
TOILET -TRAINING INDIA
On September 25, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Gates Foundation’s Global Goalkeepers Award in New York for his leadership of the Swachh…
KILLING ME SOFTLY
He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odour nor perfume—just strange,…
APOCALYPSE NOW
Kanpur, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities listed by the World Health Organization are in…
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
The other day, I watched this video of four-year-old Jackson Drew reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and marvelled…
THE AIR IS THICK
The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress seem to have finally woken up to the looming catastrophe of air pollution…
Off the Blocks
For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one…