2025

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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People’s Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations during the Cold War
by Kazushi Minami
Cornell University Press
2024. 270 pp.
(paper), ISBN 978-1-5017-7415-7
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Reviewed by Yanqiu Zheng (St. Lawrence University)
Kazushi Minami

* Letter to PM Narendra Modi

Fraud in voter rolls & the electoral process
Presenting well researched data at a press conference on August 7, 2025, Rahul Gandhi the Congress party leader and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha made explosive allegations of a large scale fraud in electoral rolls and suggests manipulation of elections in India. (See links below to the videos) It is very creditable of Rahul Gandhi and the Congress Party to have undertaken such a meticulous and difficult investigation into voter (…)

The defeat in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections came as a rude shock to the BJP after its leader L.K. Advani had launched a major blitzkrieg of

New Delhi,
August 4, 2025
To,
Shri Narendra Modi,
Hon

Outside southern Kerala state, no buyers for the ruling BJP

Standing in 2025, i.e. 79 odd years since independence, it seems both perturbing and unsettling to introspect and reflect on where we find ourselves today. What kind of country we envisioned during the stormy freedom struggle, and the present depressive scenario where we have landed. The binary is too stark and disconcerting to acknowledge that it is nowhere near the noble idea of swaraj that Mahatma Gandhi contemplated or the idea of transformation envisaged by the martyrs like Ram Prasad (…)

The Quit India Movement followed Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia even in the years after independence. After playing an underground role in the Quit India Movement for 21 months, Lohia was arrested in Bombay on 10 May 1944. He was imprisoned first in Lahore Fort and then in Agra. After being imprisoned for two years, Lohia was released in June 1946. Meanwhile, his father passes away, but Lohia did not accept coming out of jail on parole to perform his last-rites.
Lohia writes on the 25th anniversary (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK EXCERPTblanc]fond noir] *
The fusion of religion and politics has adversely affected both spheres. A Leader won power in 2014 to protect Hinduism and Hindus. Ironically, Hindus lost self-confidence because they were constantly bombarded by politicians with the warning that they are endangered. The Polarisation Project which split society on religious lines also divided Hindus between the Hindutva warriors and liberal Hindus. The differences among the Hindus based on (…)

India