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
According to Perry Anderson’s new book, The Indian Ideology, India’s democracy — routinely celebrated as the world’s largest — is actually a sham. It is fatally compromised by its origins in an anticolonial struggle led by the “monolithically Hindu” Congress party, which Anderson holds largely responsible for the bloodiness of the partition of the British-ruled subcontinent […]
“China won’t like it.” That has been a consistent refrain of the UPA government and the Congress party in shaping India‘s recent foreign policy. New Delhi‘s self-induced fear of provoking China has restricted the pursuit of beneficial engagement with other major powers and Asian neighbours. India’s self-denial is hardly consistent with its proclamations on “strategic […]
The rise of regional parties has fundamentally transformed electoral politics in India, but those parties may not be the juggernauts they’re made out to be. Read Here – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
This foreign policy crisis is of India’s own making. Inability to put its own house in order has shattered the notion of India as an emerging global power. In the last five years, the government in New Delhi decimated economic potential, scaring domestic and foreign investors, and making the county hostile to private investment. The […]
Rahul remains a mysterious and deeply private figure. He gives infrequent speeches; rarely rises in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, where he has served since 2004; and virtually never holds on-the-record interviews with reporters, whom he plainly distrusts. Although fireworks lit up the sky on the day of his ascension and party […]
The anti-Sikh riots of 1984 still haunt the ruling Indian National Congress. Almost three decades ago around 3,000 minority Sikhs were killed, allegedly at the instigation of local Congress leaders in Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, on October […]
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 […]
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 […]
When Rahul Gandhi was formally anointed this week to the number two position in India‘s Congress Party, his installation as vice president was accompanied by the usual shenanigans among party operatives. Nine years after the grandson of Indira Gandhi – and the son of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi – entered politics, the highest decision-making body […]
looking beyond borders 