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All the President’s Mien
VISITING DELHI FROM Singapore where I lived then some 20 years ago, I asked Dr Karan Singh why he hadn’t stood for President. He said it was time for a Dalit to occupy Rashtrapati Bhavan. With the NDA...
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Ram Nath Kovind: First Person Singular
JUNE 19th WAS like any other day at Raj Bhavan in Patna. Ram Nath Kovind, the then Governor of Bihar, was back from his morning walk and sipped green tea as his assistant read out the day’s plan. He...
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The Original Mrs G
WITH AN ESTIMATED 150 biographies already surveying Indira Gandhi and her legacy, the first question we must ask of the latest addition to the list is if it inspires any fresh reflection. Or is it...
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Can the Right Be Liberal?
THE CONCEPT OF liberalism in various mutant forms like ‘left-liberal’ and ‘libtard’ seems to be under attack globally. Originating in America, an idea has taken hold that liberals are effete, elite,...
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Ramachandra Guha: ‘‘The greatest favour Rahul Gandhi could do himself and to...
RAMACHANDRA GUHA, historian, scholar and public intellectual, has just come out with a revised edition of his 2007 seminal work, India after Gandhi. The book, as Guha says in its preface, happened...
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Open Diary
APART FROM 1969 when Indira Gandhi made it into a proxy battle, elections for India’s President have been remarkably sedate affairs. True, there have been contests, but they have been largely symbolic....
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Ram Nath Kovind: The First Citizen as a Forceful Unifier
ON JUNE 23RD, 2017, when the 71-year-old Ram Nath Kovind filed his nomination for the presidential poll, it was perhaps one of the many unexpected turns in his 40-year- old career as a lawyer,...
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M Venkaiah Naidu: A Friend and Loyalist
ON THE EVENING OF July 18th, Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu received a call from Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, who was in Kashmir at the time. It had been an emotional day for the 68-year-old...
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Nitish Kumar: In Good Company
THE DENOUEMENT of Bihar’s Grand Alliance coming apart was dramatic, but the political players shaping events clearly had their acts well coordinated. On the evening of July 26th, by the time Nitish...
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Ahmed Patel: Man on the Brink
He has been the Sir Galahad of political logistics, an aide of Congress President Sonia Gandhi for well over a decade. Described often as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as the cliché...
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Excerpts from a speech Rahul Gandhi has not delivered yet
SO HERE I AM, ladies and gentlemen, a lone liberal from a lost country, a country with a great tradition and a horrifying present. And to tell you a story—and I love telling stories, and at times I see...
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Modi’s Mandal: The Day of the Most Backward
INSIDE UTTAR PRADESH’S Jaunpur town, not far from its landmark 16th century Shahi Bridge on the river Gomti, RK Maurya runs a teashop that sells hot samosas and excessively sweetened tea. He does brisk...
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The Battle for Karnataka
ON THE DAY that Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi and other party leaders stood around a table at Indira Canteen in South Bengaluru’s Jayanagar and relished vaangi baat, a Kannada delicacy of rice...
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Indraprastha
WHEN IT COMES to selfishness, the so-called elites can beat the poor and illiterate masses hollow. A case in point is the recent election in the capital’s oldest and most prestigious Gymkhana Club....
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Solar Shock in Kerala
IT COULD NOT BE a worse time for the Congress party in Kerala, whose top leaders, including former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, are caught in a string of allegations that range from nepotism and...
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Indraprastha
ALONG WITH THE weather, the political climate, too, may be changing. There is a spring in the steps of the opposition types, the ones who until recently had a hang-dog look on their faces, having given...
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The Northeast: The Last Frontier
THERE IS A subtle battle of metaphors in Tripura, amidst a resounding ideological war. In this Left bastion, where images of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara,with his long hair and silver star-studded...
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Himachal Pradesh: Natural Selection
SOME THINGS JUST are. Dawn will break on the Dauladhars from the east, the streams will gush downhill, the lotus will bloom in Shimla again, and the Potus—a man called Trump—will chant ‘NaMo NaMo’ to...
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Battle for Gujarat: Amit Shah in the Vanguard
MEET PINTU PANCHAL, A student of Nirma University in Ahmedabad, passionate and street smart enough to catch the attention of Amit Shah, who is in the vanguard of the war for Gujarat, where he and his...
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Narendra Modi: Three Years and Undiminished
THE FINDINGS OF the latest Pew Research survey of India—carried out in February to March this year—should surprise no one. The survey affirms that Narendra Modi remains the most popular political...
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