When I first met Kanshi Ram as a rookie journalist, he had just founded the Bahujan Samaj Party. It was election time in the 1980s and he had no hope in hell of winning even a single seat, despite his sharp focus on Dalit welfare in the country. Read more

If what anti-corruption crusader Anjali Damania says about Nitin Gadkari is true, then there could be no greater tragedy for the Bharatiya Janata Party that is systematically getting exposed and isolated with each passing week. And there could be nothing more dangerous to Gadkari’s personal and political future. Read more

All through childhood my mother would tell me: “You have to work hard to get whatever is in your destiny. But, remember, you can never get more than you are destined to get and never before the time that you are destined to get it.’’ Read more

“As soon as BJP is done with its own leadership, it might think of providing some for the nation,” my colleague Madhavan Narayanan (@madversity) tweeted on Friday, hitting the nail bang on its head. Read more

In the 1980s, Chhagan Bhujbal, the then Shiv Sena’s lone MLA in Maharashtra, coined a famous term that has stuck in the minds of many people of that time: ‘bhukhandache Shirkhand’. In other words, he was accusing then chief minister Sharad Pawar of licking up a lot of land (more than 200 plots in Bombay, in fact) that had been de-reserved by him for unknown reasons. Read more

The February civic elections in Bombay are the only elections since my coming of age that I have missed out on getting my forefinger painted with black ink. I had to head out of town for the wedding of my niece and, while I knew which event was more important to me and mine, I still had a twinge of regret at not being able to participate in that election. Read more

A friend posted a query on my Facebook account a couple of days ago: what deal did the Shiv Sena offer the BJP to agree not to press for the post of Mayor of Bombay? Read more

Now this is one rath yatra I would really like to see – the last time that Lal Krishna Advani sailed through my part of the country on his chariot, he left behind a trail of blood and gore and the kind of communal carnage that was repeated only in Gujarat again, nearly a decade later, without even the benefit of a rath. Read more

Speaking to a man in the know, the other week, I was rather amused to hear him describe the situation in the Nationalist Congress Party rather succinctly. Read more

The BJP’s Gopinath Munde and Nitin Gadkari have almost always never agreed on anything. Read more