It seemed like a perfectly sensible policy at the time, but with the coherence of hindsight, it can now be seen as the first in a concatenation of cock-ups. The year was 1772. The East India Company was in charge …
How Modi weaponised yoga
One of the most arresting images from Narendra Modi’s first term in office as India’s Prime Minister dates from 21st June 2015. He is kneeling on a yoga mat laid out on Rajpath, New Delhi’s great ceremonial boulevard. Behind him, …
Arundhati Roy’s radical zeal
After bagging the Booker for The God of Small Things in 1997, Arundhati Roy made a life-altering decision: “to postpone reading Don DeLillo’s big book” about nuclear and bodily waste in order to make time for “reports on drainage”. This …
Inside India’s Potemkin election
Always a rather grubby affair, as if put together by minimally competent quiet quitters, Indian democracy is now in serious trouble. To be sure, its formalistic trappings remain in place. Nearly a billion Indians will file into polling stations starting …
Modi has created a new theocracy
India’s entry into the ranks of the world’s surviving theocracies — Iran, Afghanistan, the Vatican City — arrived bathetically. When the history of the nation’s descent from secularism to Hindu nationalism is written, it might end in Ayodhya. Just after …
China isn’t as strong as you think
You wouldn’t have guessed from Narendra Modi’s beaming smile after the G20 last weekend that the global economy was running out of steam. The latest IMF forecast projects it to expand by 3% this year, down from the 3.5% anticipated …
Narendra Modi’s useful idiot
India’s reputation as the world’s largest secular democracy has suffered grievously since Narendra Modi’s victory in the general elections of 2014. The first Hindu supremacist to govern with an absolute majority in parliament, he has presided over the subversion of …
Modi’s dirty war on ‘love jihad’
Liberals are livid. Ban the film, they say. It’s Islamophobic dross. India’s current ruler Narendra Modi, meanwhile, has waxed lyrical about The Kerala Story, a film about a Hindu woman hoodwinked into joining Isis. His praise has only intensified liberal …
Salman Rushdie’s latest blasphemy
“Fictions could be as powerful as histories.” In his new novel Victory City, Salman Rushdie comes as near as he has ever come to issuing a manifesto. His champions see him as a free speech martyr, his detractors as Satan …
Why can’t the West do yoga?
The ongoing debate around yoga and cultural appropriation may not be quite as old as the practice itself, but it still feels ancient. Few questions have reliably generated more ink, and more continuous angst within the controversy-hungry media class, than …
Imran Khan’s poisonous legacy
Imran Khan, the 20th-century cricketer who reinvented himself as a 21st-century zealot, lives. But what is to become of his country?
Khan was shot last week at a political procession he had convened as part of his reckless agitation to …