Journalist Manoj Mitta’s investigative book, The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra, deserves more than just a book review. The author has clinically revealed the convoluted process through which Chief Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian state of Gujarat was declared to have not been culpable in the communal riots of 2002. Modi is now the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in India’s general elections. To prove that …
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The agreement by Penguin Books India, a unit of Penguin Random House, to withdraw as well as destroy all existing copies of its 2009 book titled The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, within six months, is both disturbing as well as foreboding. The lawsuit filed against Penguin India by Dina …
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Political posturing in India has not changed since 1999, when there was a fascist party posing as a conservative one, and a royalist party posing as a liberal one. The posturing continues, but since then the Indian National Congress (INC) party has embraced coalition politics. And it may now be in a stronger position to attract allies than its rival, …
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Nepal has two months to go for polls, India’s general elections are six months away, and bizarre things are happening as campaigning picks up. But even by subcontinental standards, nothing can quite surpass the spectacle of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) bringing to its rallies people sporting skullcaps and burqas and shepherding them into a reserved enclosure as happened …
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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ novelist Milan Kundera wrote. Indeed, those who wield power often try to efface the imprints of their despicable past, recreating on the slate of a cleansed public memory an endearing image of themselves. Yet, their darkled past returns to haunt them because of individuals who want to …
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Now that India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has settled on Narendra Modi, a top right-wing politician and chief minister of western state of Gujarat, as its prime ministerial candidate for the next year’s crucial elections, commentators across India and beyond are looking at the emerging political circus with inquietude. Modi is likely to face a stiff challenge from Rahul …
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