“Gandhi” is a wargame, but a strange one. It inverts Clausewitz’s famous dictum: Instead of war as politics by other means, nonviolence becomes war waged by other means. Players control one of four competing factions: the British Raj; the Indian National Congress; the Muslim League; or the Revolutionaries (reflecting an amorphous collection of groups that […]
This year, as the world marked the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, Indian voters repudiated his legacy by re-electing Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By doubling down on Islamophobia and Hindu nationalism, Modi and his party has rejected Gandhi’s vision of interfaith harmony and political pluralism. Read Here – Project Syndicate
During his years in South Africa, Gandhi sought to ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission. In doing so, he not only rendered African exploitation and oppression invisible, but was, on occasion, a willing part of their subjugation and racist stereotyping. This is not the Gandhi spoken of in hagiographic speeches by politicians more than […]
Multiple Indias have always existed in Gandhi’s land of 700,000 villages, but never perhaps in such proximity or with such access to one another, a rising class of conspicuous consumers hoisted through a decade of now faltering growth hard by villages where unemployed men dim boredom with alcohol. Read Here – New York Times
It’s a nationalist myth that Indian independence was won by militant Congress direct action and that partition was the inevitable price exacted by a pro-Muslim colonial power determined to divide and rule. On the contrary, effective independence was implicit in the progressive constitutional reforms introduced by the Raj in 1909 and 1919, well before Gandhi […]
India does not reconcile contradictions so much as inhabit them. Is there one god? Three? Gods? Without number? Yes, yes, and yes. Visitors are instructed to leave their Cartesian logic at passport control. This is contrary to my all-too-binary nature. But after two weeks in Delhi talking to people about the wrinkled, lumbering, battle-scarred pachyderm […]
Gandhi has become, in India and around the globe, a simplified version of what he was: a smiling saint who wore a white loincloth and John Lennon spectacles, who ate little and succeeded in bringing down the greatest empire the world has ever known through non-violent civil disobedience. President Obama, who kept a portrait of […]
Last weekend, India’s Congress Party, which has enjoyed power for almost nine years as the majority party in the current UPA coalition government, set down a roadmap not only for its own future but also for that of the world’s largest democracy. At a party convention in the northern city of Jaipur, it appointed the young […]
British politics often seems dull without a glamorous political dynasty such as the Kennedys, the Bhuttos or our own Nehru-Gandhi family. Britons, of course, retort that they have one of the world’s most famous dynasties in the form of the royal family. It is also seen as a measure of the strength of British democracy […]
looking beyond borders 