L K Sharma
Statues are not safe in India
One cynic says that after every election, the new Government can spend its first year in uninstalling the statutes erected by the previous regime. One commentator is sure that streets named after Lenin will now be renamed to glorify some Hindu nationalist leader!
Of sacred cows and profane men
In India today, the national discourse is dominated by the cow. The cow has highlighted religious, regional, social and cultural differences. Some humans have been killed in the name of the cow.
Modi marches on amid hope and fear
Modi can get away with anything now. His public adores muscular Hinduism, majoritarianism, politicised nationalism and a neo-liberal development model which gives subsidized big corporates big incentives.
Another arrested revolution in the East
Donald Trump ought to thank Modi for showing the way to electoral success. More and more leaders are convinced that perpetual confrontation pays in politics.
A flashpoint in South Asia?
“You question India’s territorial integrity, I will question Pakistan’s. You interfere in our internal affairs, we will interfere in yours.”
Trump diminishes democracy
How the Americans vote in their Presidential election should be only their business but it cannot be so because when America sneezes the world catches cold!
Nationalism Fever Strikes India
The debate in India about ‘nationalism’ or ‘anti-nationalism’ is essentially between the pro and anti-Modi forces. “When a society is in a state of frenzy, words acquire different meanings. “Intolerance” becomes a word of abuse against the Prime Minister. “Freedom of expression” signifies anti-nationalism.”
Writers get bouquets, not brickbats
The business model of the Jaipur Literature Festival will be studied as a case study, the two writer-directors having successfully yoked together the rival Hindu Goddesses of wealth and wisdom.
India: roller-coastering democracy
The nation is sharply divided between those protesting against growing intolerance and those attacking them for seeing what does not exist and asking them to migrate to Pakistan.
A vote against religious hate
No agency records the levels of mental pollution and no scientific instrument records the intolerance levels in a society, but even a casual visitor to India would notice the rise in the levels of intolerance and the rampaging bands of provocateurs inciting religious passions and violence.
The Desert of Forbidden Art
Docfilmfest
Wanted in Europe