Contrary to what some politicians say, I do not believe the Sangh Parivar’s latest stress on Hindutva is a nine-day wonder that will disappear with the Kumbh Mela. I have reason to be convinced that it is a clever, well thought out strategy and that those who are propagating it know even as they call for the Ram temple in Ayodhya that the temple issue is a self-defeating goal. Read more

Some years ago then RSS chief the late K Sudershan had come up with a unique plan to combat the presumed mushrooming population of Muslims in India. Contrary to all anthropological data in the country he thought all Muslims had four wives when the fact was that it was more Hindu and Jain businessmen, rather than the comparatively poor Muslims, who had the means to afford second and third establishments had married more than once. Read more

Back in those days when I was at college and Subramanian Swamy was a Havard-returned guest lecturer at our university, I remember one of our professors of political science watch the man grimly as he spoke more on economics than on politics. Read more

In a recent interview to an English TV channel, I was both startled and delighted to see Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi tongue-tied – though that’s a mild word for his reaction – to a question on whether he thinks he should apologise for 2002 to be able to clear his path to New Delhi. Read more

For all those people who might think Narendra Modi is made of the stuff of great things, actually he is proving to be so much of a very small man. Read more

For first time in my life, ever, I felt sorry for L K Advani. The elder ’statesman’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who has done more for his party than any other leader, including Narendra Modi, does not even have a right to his own ambition? Read more

Minutes after senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L K Advani had apologised to Sonia Gandhi for falsely accusing her and her family of having Swiss bank accounts of their own, Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, had tweeted Read more

On August 15 last year the BJP made such a fuss about their party president Nitin Gadkari’s absence at the flag hoisting ceremony in their party headquarters in New Delhi. Read more

At a time when television news was just coming of age in India (the mid-Nineties), I recall I was in Delhi when the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri had pulled support from the Deve Gowda government. Read more

The colour saffron is one of my favourites. So is the colour green. Predictably, then, in my earlier years when I was starting out as a political correspondent, most of my clothes reflected these colours, in one hue or the other. Read more