RESEARCH

I f you have seen the crowd during the August 2011 movement led by Anna Hazare and then if your jaws dropped when you saw lakhs turn up to hear BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi even in the south Indian state of Kerala where the party was near absent, you have seen nothing. You must know PV Rajagopal, president of Ekta Parishad, who commands a following of lakhs of landless and homeless people across the country, concentrated mostly in the central provinces though. Rajagopal addressing one of his mammoth rallies in 2012 If you have not seen the size of a crowd Rajagopal can lead, it is because New Delhi, then a Congress bastion, did not allow his procession to ever reach the country’s capital. Which government of a democracy would not turn jittery at the sight of a disciplined queue at least 1,00,000 strong comprising emaciated bodies and impoverished faces of tribal folk and other poor people entering the capital of the country after...

If the only means you can think of expressing your disagreement with some cartoons — however unsavoury — is murder, you need to be treated on your terms. Andcould we stop that facile ‘all are equal’ apology? Islamist fundamentalism is the greatest force of Evil facing humanity. I ndia joined the world yesterday in being stunned at the brutal murder of about a dozen journalists employed with Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly published from Paris. ‘We will kill you to express our disagreement with you’ is the clear message of Islamist extremists. They are an international mafia that studies a target diligently and finally eliminates it at will: from 9/11 to 7/11 to 26/11 and more. Charlie… is a small media house, most of whose employees work out of their homes and meet only once a week: Wednesday. The terrorists did this homework and finished their task with precision, without getting caught by the supposedly superior police of a First World country, even as a shock...

The establishment of NITI Aayog is a clear message that the government is committed to reforms, decentralization and a cooperative federalism that advocates involving states in the Centre’s decision making. I n what can be seen as the greatest policy shift by the new dispensation, the NDA government has begun the year 2015 with scrapping of the Soviet-modelled Planning Commission with NITI Aayog. While “niti” sounds like the Sanskrit-origin word implying “policy” and “ethics”, it’s actually an acronym for National Institution for Transforming India.   Swarajya was the first media outlet to forecast the change rather than speculate what it would be like: “…the Planning Commission will soon morph into a body that facilitates coordination between the Centre and the states.It will certainly not be a planning organ by another name, and it will not be a typical think-tank as is being speculated in the media,” read our 23 October article on the issue. And that is ...

I n the midst of mourning in the subcontinent and inexplicable silence of the Arab world following the Peshawar attack where 132 children were butchered by terrorists came Tahreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s justification for the massacre that is likely to lead to impressionable minds among Muslims seeing religious reason in violence and those among Hindus seeing Islam as an evil faith. Official statement from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan after the Peshawar massacre The message in Urdu above (in white on black background) issued by the terrorist outfit reads: “ T ā lib ā n ke tarjum ā n Muhammad Khur ā s ā ni: k ā kahn ā hai ke muj ā hidi:n ko hid ā y ā t di: gai: th ĩ: ke woh sirf baRe bachch õ k ā qit ā l karẽː. Pesh ā war ki: k ā rw ā i: sunnat-e-nabvi: kay a’in mut ā biq hai ky õ ke Nabi: kari:m ne bhi: Banu Qurayzah ke qit ā l kay waqt yahi: shart-e-mub ā rak ā’ id ki thi: ke sirf un bachch õ ko qatl kiy ā j ā e jin ke zer n ā f b ā l dikh ā i den ā shuru: h...

H is rationale is sound. And he has a way with words — he borrows the term “Californication” from the American comedy by that name to summarise Amartya Sen and Jen Drèze’s description of a liberalising India as “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa” — which is remarkable, given that he went to-and-fro between electronic and print mediums of journalism, a transition the venerable Mark Tully famously did not find smooth. Hindol Sengupta in  Recasting India  depicts a country whose citizens have perhaps made more sense of freedom in the last two decades than what its politicians could muster. A member of the upwardly mobile middle class would be tempted to own it as his or her published title. Binding:  Paperback Publisher:  Palgrave Author:  Hindol Sengupta Released:  2014 Beginning with Dwarakanath Tagore, Gurudev Rabindranath’s grandfather who had interests in coal, tea, jute, sugar refining, newspapers and shipping, th...

T here are five different manners in which the RTI application from Jashodaben Modi, estranged wife of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wanting to be assured of her safety, can be viewed: hypothetically, liberally, spiritually, historically and factually. None of the ways, as readers will see through this article, justifies the sudden advocacy by ‘social liberals’ (read detractors of Modi) that the prime minister must either accept Jashodaben in his family fold or divorce her — one of the two, normally accepted social conventions for partners in a couple. Hypothesis No way is Jashodaben in a position comparable to that of Indira Gandhi who had irked an entire community with her mishandling of the Punjab situation by first hobnobbing with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and then sanctioning Operation Bluestar to let Army into the sanctum sanctorum of the Golden Temple of Amritsar. Invocation of the incident perpetrated by Mrs Gandhi’s bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pro-market, but he wouldn't rush liberalisation without calculating the political implications of every capitalist measure proposed by economists. F ar better than the Congress, much less than liberal economics, but an urge to push it within the confines of political realism — that is how the Modi government’s performance can be summarised. Liberals who supported the Bharatiya janata Party’s campaign in the hope of a revival of the national economy, but who are not in touch with functionaries of the government, have had occasions of despair. Why so many foreign trips? Why has one minister been entrusted with two of the most important portfolios, both of which demand full-time involvement? Why no thrust on Hindutva ? These are some of the FAQs the government must live with. After meeting some economists the prime minister trusts, I sought to allay concerns of the Right-of-Centre supporters of the party on Facebook. In the group ...