Don’t India’s politicians get it? The significance of the Jessica Lall case goes much beyond the fact that a young girl was murdered and that her killer was finally convicted.

The true significance of the case is that it symboli Read more

Do you sometimes feel that intellectuals and experts like complicating issues needlessly so that lay people like you and me are not only excluded from the discussion but are also left hopelessly confused?

Do you wonder why so many activists and self-proclaimed scholars take the positions of lay people and then caricature them so that they can construct men of straw to attack? Read more

I find most reality shows revoltingly tacky. When the trend towards reality TV took off abroad over a decade ago, I was horrified. Was Britain really fascinated by a show in which dysfunctional morons were locked up in a house and urged to fight and fornicate? It was, alas, and Big Brother became a huge hit. Read more

On the grounds that there’s not a lot happening this week, I’m going to focus on something that seems slightly obscure and out of the headlines but is actually crucial to the future of India.

If you look at the way the election campaign was conducted, two sets of economic issues kept cropping up again and again. Read more

Consumed as we are with the hurly-burly of the General Election, we may have lost sight of an important development in our neighbourhood. As the Pakistan government tries to persuade the Taliban to retreat from its latest encampment a mere 100 kilometers away from Islamabad, the world — and Washington, in particular — has finally come around to the view that Pakistan is on the brink of becoming the next Afghanistan. Read more

Few things annoy me as much as the claim often advanced by well-meaning but woolly- headed (and usually Punjabi) liberals to the effect that when it comes to India and Pakistan, “We’re all the same people, yaar.”

This may have been true once upon a time. Before 1947, Pakistan was part of undivided India and you could claim that Punjabis from West Punjab (what is now Pakistan) were as Indian as, say, Tamils from Madras. Read more

It has now become increasingly clear that India is being naïve in expecting Pakistan to cooperate in the investigation into the Bombay attacks. Judging by the things that Pakistani diplomats and politicians said in Islamabad, Davos, London and Delhi last week, Pakistan’s attitude is defiant and unhelpful. Read more

In the growing euphoria over emerging superpower India and the new prosperity that has caused us to be the envy of the world, there is one statistic that we always brush under the carpet. No matter how much money we, in the cities, earn, the India of the villages is a very different place. Small and medium farmers struggle to find food for their families. Most are in debt — to banks and moneylenders — and many cannot ever hope to repay these loans.

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