-
Mobilizing civil society
CIVIL society groups have always been engaged in mainstream politics in one way or another, albeit at its margins. Rarely ...
Read More -
Censorship and self-censorship
THE problems for democracies, observed an editorial in the inaugural issue of the national newsmagazine India Today (December 1975), “is ...
Read More -
Foreign funds, Indian minds
A few years ago I had written in these very pages of Civil Society a column titled “Funding the Indian ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Quantifying reality
THE Global Hunger Index (GHI), published by two European non-government organizations, has been universally slammed in India both by government ...
Read More -
Among the people
ON the eve of Rahul Gandhi’s padayatra political commentator Neerja Chaudhuri made a pertinent observation in a televised discussion. Almost ...
Read More -
Uncertainty complex
A new ‘uncertainty complex’ is unsettling lives and has already reversed the gains of five years of human development at ...
Read More -
India at 75
In quick succession, between 1896 and 1906, Swami Vivekananda, Jamsetji Tata, Rabindranath Tagore and the engineer, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who founded the ...
Read More -
War and the economy
WAR has direct human and economic consequences. Often, such consequences impact not just the countries at war but many others, ...
Read More -
The federal political cycle
ECONOMISTS are familiar with the concept of a business cycle and some even with the idea of a political business ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Atmanirbharata redux
WHEN Prime Minister Narendra Modi first spoke about the concept of atmanirbharata, many mainstream economists criticized him for reverting to ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
The decline of debate
ON August 5, 2019, I met Arun Jaitley, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, for the last time at his ...
Read More -
The outward bound
When news of business billionaire MukeshAmbani acquiring a massive 300-acre estate in England was flashed in the media, it was ...
Read More -
Bombay House and Delhi
WHEN the Narendra Modi government announced its decision to hand over Air India back to the House of Tatas, a ...
Read More -
Koizumi’s question
ON his first visit to India in 2005, Japan’s Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, asked his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Diplomacy and public opinion
THE decision of the external affairs ministry to issue an official statement in response to tweets by American singer Rihanna ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
COVID and the communists
HEALTH activists and concerned citizens have tried for a long time to place healthcare and public health on the national ...
Read More -
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. ...
Read More -
The citizenship paradox
I was amused to read a tweet from Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in which he quoted former Union ...
Read More -
Language and opportunity
Of all the daily editorials I had to write during my tenure as the editorial page editor of the Times ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Politics of consensus
In his authoritative treatise on the Indian Constitution, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin made the interesting ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Do ministers matter?
Time was when Hyderabad had become famous for being home to the largest council of ministers. More recently it has ...
Read More -
Do manifestos matter?
A committee set up by the Central Election Commission of India has come out with a curious, if amusing, ruling. ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
The language of politics
That she could speak in Hindi, even if with a heavy Italian accent, endeared Sonia Gandhi to millions of Indians. ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Friends with benefits
A few months ago I had to discontinue this column when I took up an assignment that did not give ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
States of enterprise
Anxiety about the future within the business community created by the break-up of the united state of Andhra Pradesh has ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
Regime change in Delhi?
Three summers ago a routine Lok Sabha election, 16th in a row in independent India, threw up a slightly unexpected ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More -
The importance of pretence
The arrival of a politically powerful leader heading a single party government with absolute majority in Parliament has renewed the ...
Read More -
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’. ...
Read More -
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 ...
Read More