RESEARCH

The politician used every past associate of his to climb the ladder of fame and success, and a large section of the journalistic fraternity agreed to be cheerleaders of his fake movement with initial help from the UPA government and waylaid RSS swayamsevaks   S ome days ago, Times Now went ballistic over a claim by Kumar Vishwas of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi had a soft corner for the party she is now in even during the Jan Lokpal (JLP) movement of 2011. The claim sounded strange to this columnist who was a part of the movement, albeit with a fair dose of scepticism. Here was a political poet known for his fondness for former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and eulogies dedicated to current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was asserting that Bedi, not he, was the BJP’s mole in India against Corruption (IaC)! But my amusement was not substantive enough to merit a full-fledged a...

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...