Mobilizing civil society

CIVIL society groups have always been engaged in mainstream politics in one way or another, albeit at its margins. Rarely ...

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Censorship and self-censorship

THE problems for democracies, observed an editorial in the inaugural issue of the national newsmagazine India Today (December 1975), “is ...

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Foreign funds, Indian minds

A few years ago I had written in these very pages of Civil Society a column titled “Funding the Indian ...

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End the plan holiday

WE have had ‘plan holidays’, that is, a break from five-year plans, many times before. In the late 1960s, the ...

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Quantifying reality

THE Global Hunger Index (GHI), published by two European non-government organizations, has been universally slammed in India both by government ...

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Among the people

ON the eve of Rahul Gandhi’s padayatra political commentator Neerja Chaudhuri made a pertinent observation in a televised discussion. Almost ...

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Uncertainty complex

A new ‘uncertainty complex’ is unsettling lives and has already reversed the gains of five years of human development at ...

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India at 75

In quick succession, between 1896 and 1906, Swami Vivekananda, Jamsetji Tata, Rabindranath Tagore and the engineer, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who founded the ...

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War and the economy

WAR has direct human and economic consequences. Often, such consequences impact not just the countries at war but many others, ...

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The federal political cycle

ECONOMISTS are familiar with the concept of a business cycle and some even with the idea of a political business ...

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The other divide

AMITAVA Ghosh’s recently published book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, exploring the historical roots of global warming and ecological destruction, tracing them ...

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Atmanirbharata redux

WHEN Prime Minister Narendra Modi first spoke about the concept of atmanirbharata, many mainstream economists criticized him for reverting to ...

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IOU: A 2022 message for 2024

INDIA is a psephologist’s and electoral data miner’s delight. Not only does the country generate an enormous amount of electoral ...

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The decline of debate

ON August 5, 2019, I met Arun Jaitley, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, for the last time at his ...

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The outward bound

When news of business billionaire MukeshAmbani acquiring a massive 300-acre estate in England was flashed in the media, it was ...

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Bombay House and Delhi

WHEN the Narendra Modi government announced its decision to hand over Air India back to the House of Tatas, a ...

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Koizumi’s question

ON his first visit to India in 2005, Japan’s Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, asked his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ...

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Narasimha Rao’s legacy

THE birth centenary of former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao will be observed on June 28, 2021. The government of ...

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Diplomacy and public opinion

THE decision of the external affairs ministry to issue an official statement in response to tweets by American singer Rihanna ...

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Memoirs of a Lutyens leader

IT is perhaps typical of a quintessential Lutyens’ Delhi leader like Pranab Mukherjee that only the fourth volume of his ...

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The post-COVID world order

When COVID-19 becomes history the era of this virus will perhaps be remembered by two words — lockdown and webinar. One ...

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COVID and the communists

HEALTH activists and concerned citizens have tried for a long time to place healthcare and public health on the national ...

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Strong leader, weak State

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore a paradox at the heart of the present political conjuncture in India. ...

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The citizenship paradox

I was amused to read a tweet from Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in which he quoted former Union ...

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Language and opportunity

Of all the daily editorials I had to write during my tenure as the editorial page editor of the Times ...

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New India and the West

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has expressed serious concern about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) voted ...

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Politics of consensus

In his authoritative treatise on the Indian Constitution, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin made the interesting ...

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Politics of foreign trade policy

It is not surprising that the subject of India joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement figured in the ...

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China's shadow on South Asia

China’s dramatic and sustained economic rise over the past quarter-century has impacted the global economy and global geopolitics. In purchasing ...

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A loyalty tax on nationalism

One of the amusing aspects of the debate on nationalism triggered by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaign and ...

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What's manifest in manifestos

A party political manifesto is supposed to impart distinct brand identity to a political party and its leadership so that ...

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Who will police the police?

Over the next several weeks the festival of democracy will keep Indians busy and entertained. The jingle on my radio ...

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Do ministers matter?

Time was when Hyderabad had become famous for being home to the largest council of ministers. More recently it has ...

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Do manifestos matter?

A committee set up by the Central Election Commission of India has come out with a curious, if amusing, ruling. ...

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Poverty of the wealthy

In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Hyderabad, I invited the then finance minister of West ...

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Who needs a library?

Driving down one of Beijing’s broad boulevards one evening, I chanced upon a tall building with dozens of students seated ...

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An Indian view of the world

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) funds a think-tank studying China called the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS). Its board ...

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The language of politics

That she could speak in Hindi, even if with a heavy Italian accent, endeared Sonia Gandhi to millions of Indians. ...

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Mr Mukherjee goes to Nagpur

Pranab Mukherjee has got the Congress Party’s knickers in a twist. It is a measure of his political clout and ...

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Friends with benefits

A few months ago I had to discontinue this column when I took up an assignment that did not give ...

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A ‘Learn East’ policy

This is Sanjaya Baru's farewell column. He joins FICCI as Secretary-General.  As India celebrates 70 years of freedom from colonial ...

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States of enterprise

Anxiety about the future within the business community created by the break-up of the united state of Andhra Pradesh has ...

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The making of a President

Nothing unsettles the old Delhi Darbar more than to find a hitherto unknown name hog the headlines. The question “Kovind ...

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Regime change in Delhi?

Three summers ago a routine Lok Sabha election, 16th in a row in independent India, threw up a slightly unexpected ...

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Every dog has his day!

There is delicious irony in the fact that on the one hand it was a former maharaja who recently ordered ...

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Coalitions are like amoebas

Power politics is not a morality play! That quotable quote may well be found in Machiavelli’s tracts but it was ...

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Funding the Indian think tank

A columnist pens out at regular intervals one’s opinion about something or the other that one imagines to be of ...

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The importance of pretence

The arrival of a politically powerful leader heading a single party government with absolute majority in Parliament has renewed the ...

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Modi’s rupee call is politics first

Economics is a political science. In the 18th and 19th centuries the discipline was in fact known as ‘political economy’. ...

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The power of loyalty

The Indian sub-continent has had several capital cities of successive kingdoms and empires, but Delhi occupies a special place. Mohammed ...

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