The long road to justice
The Special Investigation Team tasked by the Supreme Court of India to enquire into the communal violence that shook Gujarat eight years ago has summoned Chief Minister Narendra Modi to appear before it for questioning on March 21. The summons is pursuant to a petition filed in the court by Zakia Jaffrey, widow of the former Congress Member of [...]
Irrational protests
Islamist fundamentalist organisations rooted in religious obscurantism have long been prone to sudden bursts of irrational violence at the slightest provocation. The stone-throwing and arson in Karnataka by fanatics against the publication in a Kannada daily of an article, purportedly by Taslima Nasreen, on wearing of the burka were a nasty [...]
Hounding out Husain
With reports suggesting that M F Husain has accepted the offer of honorary citizenship from Qatar and, given India’s rules on not allowing dual citizenship, we will have to face the patently absurd and shameful predicament of arguably our most celebrated artist literally being forced to renounce Indian citizenship. The way to make the best of a [...]
Home Alone
Cities are where strangers meet. But in Ahmedabad, a town which is yet to recover from the intense trauma of the 2002 communal riots, both Hindus and Muslims still perceive each other purely through a lens of fear and insecurity. The municipal corporation randomly picked some 8,000 families to resettle them along the Sabarmati Riverfront project [...]
Leave the Law to the Law
Justice, essentially, is a system by which the law is kept according to a consensual set of norms. In plainspeak that means some things are considered illegal and with an agreed-upon system in place law-breakers are doled out punishment according to the nature of their crimes. When the law fails in the eyes of the beholder, the vigilante is born. [...]
It’s just not Mumbai anymore
Mumbai is delightfully different. At Davos, Mukesh Ambani says that Mumbai is for everyone, while Anil Ambani had earlier declared his admiration for Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, which wants to keep certain people out on pain of death. Rahul Gandhi chimes in and is threatened by the Shiv Sena which, in the meantime, has been told off by the national [...]
Remembering Narasimha Rao
The recent “exoneration” of late prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao by the justice M.S. Liberhan commission of inquiry has once again ignited the controversy surrounding his tenure as India’s top executive. So what was Rao all about? While there are few doubts as to his keen intelligence, it is the other aspects of his persona, ones that had [...]