2010

Dear Srimati Sonia Gandhi,
I believe that you are one of the few people in the UPA Government who believes that governance includes looking at people’s problems rather than gunning solely for economic growth. This I understand from several statements made by you, in particular, regarding not allowing the dilution of the RTI Act and regarding getting to the root causes of the Maoist militancy rather than merely increasing the use of police force. It is this belief that prompts me to write (…)

I have slightly modified the title of Chaturanan Mishra’s paper in Mainstream (May 8, 2010). There is no traditional Socialist—even Lohiaite—party in India today. All Lohiaites have formed, according to Mishra, casteist parties. No united front with casteist parties, he declares; but as the Congress or its splinters, like the Maratha Sharad Pawer-led NC, are ‘secular’, the CPs may have united front with them in order to prevent the ‘communal’ BJP from coming to power.
This shows that the (…)

This article was written before the latest wave of unrest in the Kashmir Valley sparked by the plenomena of fake encounters.
It was a pleasant diversion for the tension-ridden people of the Kashmir Valley when they celebrated the announcement that a Kashmiri boy, Shah Faesal, had topped the list of successful candidates of the Indian Administrative Service. There are already some IAS officers from Kashmir but this was the first time that a Kashmiri candidate had topped the list.
The (…)

Are Rabindranath and Tagore the same phenomenon? It may sound absurd, but it is not always that when we talk of Tagore we are also talking of Rabindranath, and vice versa. Years ago an eminent professor of English from another part of India asked me in confidence: is Tagore really that great? This was a decade after his birth centenary. When I answered him, I wasn’t telling him of Tagore, but Rabindranath. Maybe it was from around that time that a non-Bengali Indian friend of mine, not sworn (…)

It was a murder of an old activist, which the RSS would love to forget. It is a different matter that despite the innumerable ways in which it has tried to banish the memory of the whole incident it has found it very difficult to get away with it. And with the latest exposures in the Ajmer Dargah bomb blast case the whole issue has once again returned to haunt it.
A former RSS pracharak, who was an accused in the murder of a Congress leader and his son, was shot dead in Dewas town, about (…)

The following is a press statement issued on May 28, 2010.
We, the undersigned, are very disturbed by the recent controversy that has been generated in the media on the issue of legal representation of Mohammad Afzal Guru. An NGO, the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, in a letter to the media signed by its office-bearers, Gurusharan Singh, S.A.R. Geelani, Amit Bhattacharyya and Rona Wilson, has claimed that Mr N.D. Pancholi “was never at any point the counsel of Mr Afzal (…)

Germans sign the Eurozone package in the context of the Greece bail-out and the German leader visits German soldiers in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton is in China to talk to China about the US’ relations with it. The US renews its agreement with Japan over its military base and fumes against North Korea’s hostile act against South Korea, while Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchange fire at the border near the Poonch area. The Afghans are in conclave with the not-very-insignificant Afghan (…)

The Hindu, May 25, posted the photograph of a person in its frontpage under the head “Six Naxals held for Dantewada massacre”, http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/25/stories/20100525 62010100.htm
The person, Barsa Lakhma, is alleged to be a Naxal “leader”, a “commander” who is said to be involved in the gunning down of 76 security personnel. He along with five others—Oyam Hidma, Podiyami Hidma, Kawasi Budra, Oya Ganga, and Dura Joga—are in police custody after a “major breakthrough”.
Take a (…)

India is gearing up its decennial census now. The present opposition to the caste-based census has a long lineage. G.S. Ghurye, one of the pioneers of Indian Sociology, had, way back in 1932, criticised the colonial practice of the caste-based census and the consequent politicisation of caste. He also attributed the origin of caste-based reservation to this politicisation and recorded his disapproval to the idea of caste-based reservation.
Caste in India is increasingly seen as an obscure (…)

As a former IPS officer with experience of working in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Union Home ministry for many years and author of two recent books on the Indian police, I have read with interest the IB centenary endowment lecture, titled “A New Architecture for India’s Security”, delivered by the Union Home Minister on December 23, 2009. The lecture lacks credibility and carries no conviction because it ignores the long history and present predicament of the Indian Police, which (…)