Tag Archives: BJP

The U.S. is starting 2015 with both a presidential trip to India and the approval of civilian aid for Pakistan.

As Kashmir votes, the modalities of Pandit resettlement will mark the limits of India’s rising saffron tide.

With the romanticized temper of the 100 days of Narendra Modi government over, the anti-Muslim tone is heard throughout India; in fact, this constitutes a major strand in the bond by which the Hindutva forces feel united after the triumphant majority to the Indian parliament, says one analyst.

The penchant and proclivity for making India Hindu is not a new phenomenon in Indian political life; but until the 2014 election, it did not have the power or the heft to pose a serious challenge to the idea of India

A new book reveals that while Manmohan Singh wanted to find a solution to India’s dispute with Pakistan over Siachen glacier, opposition from his army chief and senior colleagues, scuttled any prospects for this. The army chief General JJ Singh, acted in a duplicitous way. In close-door briefings, the General would say that a deal with Pakistan was doable, but in public he would back A.K. Antony when the defense minister chose not to back the PM.

Moving away from Siachen and Kargil mindsets in both India and Pakistan won’t be easy. But big crowns come stuffed with thorns. Even the smallest ambition for peace between India and Pakistan needs statesmanship and roadblock-mitigation. Hope is not a plan, no matter how audacious.

Early one summer morning in 2008, an aging Toyota car slowed down to turn at the corner next to the Indian Embassy complex in Kabul, transforming itself as it did so into a wall of searing, white light. Fifty-eight people were killed and 141 injured, their bodies torn apart by shock waves, fires, and shards of metal and glass. Inside …

On the eve of the 2004 general election, held against the backdrop of the Gujarat riots, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies widely predicted to win, a group of leading South Asian scholars discussed the alarming resurgence of the Hindu Right and its implications in a book somewhat rhetorically titled Will Secular India Survive?   The authors made …

  Foreign policy has rarely mattered in Indian elections, yet one of the biggest challenges the new government in New Delhi will face is in confronting an international system that has felt systematically let down by India over the last few years. The world is hoping — as are India’s impatient and angry young voters — for a quick recovery …

At election time in India, the mainstream media likes to predict that Muslims will turn out in overwhelmingly high numbers to vote, driven by their passion for the politics of identity. No empirical evidence is ever furnished to sustain this narrative. This has acquired the aura of truth in the last two decades as the Hindu ‘upper’ castes and middle …