A few months after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, a young political scientist named Rajni Kothari published a seminal article, entitled ‘The Congress “System” in India’. In it,…
Browsing: Columns
Droupadi Murmu’s rise to Raisina Hill is indeed remarkable. A symbolic yet tactical move by the BJP, it marks a strategic shift to broaden its out-reach…
One of the most revealing sidelights of this election has been watching the intellectual twists and turns of a battery of ‘experts’ — academics and journalists…
New book throws light on the time when Nehru and Rajendra Prasad tackled growing concerns over ‘anti-India’ activities of missionaries Most people know about the 1951…
[Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s political ascendance, and what it means for India, is as impactful and far-reaching as the political imprint left by the country’s first…
A Quran handed down for seven generations of a Hindu zamindar family and a mosque they built 150 years ago show why the Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb is…
BJP leaders often claim that there is no religious bias when it comes to government schemes. A trip to a village in western UP offers some…
Ever since Yogi Adityanath became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, there have been allegations of ‘Thakur-raj’, or dominance by upper-caste Thakurs, in the state. His ascent…
HE BJP DRAWS a distinction between ‘Western’ notions of feminism and its own. The older women’s movement drew on early global feminist movements to stress on…
A nation’s movies often reflect its self-image. War films, even more so. As Indian troops face down China’s People Liberation Army in the Galwan Valley and across the Line of Actual Control, it is not entirely coincidental that the shift to such aggressive posturing by China on its real-life borders, from Ladakh to the South China Sea, was preceded in recent years by a major shift in depictions of the PLA in Chinese film