Ramachandra Guha's Blog

In about a year’s time, the citizens of India will vote in their sixteenth General Elections. The last such exercise, held in May 2009, showcased a bewildering variety of parties and politicians. Some 700 million adults were eligible to vote; about 400 million actually voted, to choose five hundred and forty-three members of the national Parliament. The Republic of India also has twenty-eight states, in which elections are likewise held on a five-year cycle. Altogether, many more Indians have...

Marxism claims to offer a materialist approach to history, where class relations and the forces of technology are given more importance than the doings of individuals. In practice, however, political regimes based on professedly Marxist principles have indulged in an unprecedented worship of their leaders. Communist parties the world over brook no criticism of the Holy Trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. No Prime Minister or President of a bourgeois democracy has ever experienced the slavish...

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Joseph Conrad

India’s two main religions, Hinduism and Islam, are both deeply patriarchal. Their scriptures and their historical practice have relegated women to an inferior status. Women were not allowed to assume positions of power and authority. Women were denied the right to follow the profession of their choice. Men could choose to have several wives at once, but women had to be content with a si...

A journalist who recently interviewed Narendra Modi reported their conversation as follows: ‘Gujarat, he told me, merely has a seafront. It has no raw materials—no iron ore for steel, no coal for power and no diamond mines. Yet it has made huge strides in these fields. Imagine, he added, if we had the natural resources of an Assam, a Jharkhand and a West Bengal: “I would have changed the face of India.”‘(see The Telegraph, 18th January 2013).

This conversation (and that claim) underlines much...

Rahul Gandhi’s elevation to the Vice-Presidentship of the Congress, and the possibility that he might become Prime Minister were his party to form a government after the next General Elections, prompts a careful look at his record in politics. Consider these facts:

1. Mr Gandhi has been a Member of the Lok Sabha for almost nine years now. In that time, of every ten days Parliament has been in session he has attended only four. In almost two full terms as M. P., he has asked four or five questi...

Following the well-attended (and incident-free) one-day series between India and Pakistan—the first since the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008—the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Zaka Ashraf, suggested that the two countries play each other regularly, for what might be called the ‘Jinnah-Gandhi’ Trophy. Reading this, I remembered a similar proposal being made, decades ago, in the pages of the Dawn newspaper. I dug out my notes, and this is what I found:

In 1955, an Indian team le...

The Hindu ends its moving front-page editorial on Sunday with this pointed and very pertinent plea: ‘The Congress and the Opposition should forget about playing to the gallery. If they are serious about the rights of women, they should quickly pass the Women’s Reservation Bill. Let the presence of at least 181 female MPs in the next Lok Sabha—and the political mobilisation of women this will slowly catalyze—be Parliament’s way of honouring the death of this Unknown Citizen’.

Although widely us...

Last week, the novelist, essayist, and polemicist U. R. Ananthamurthy turned eighty. His Bangalore home is named ‘Suragi’, after a flower that retains its fragrance even after it has aged and dried up. Some might find the name self-regarding; but then Ananthamurty is a man with much to be immodest about. His novels Samskara and Bharathipura redefined the terrain of modern Indian literature. His newspaper articles in Kannada have a wide readership. As a legendary teacher of English in Sagar an...

In an essay published just before the General Elections of 2009, I had argued that for Indian democracy to become more focused and effective, four things needed to happen:

First, the Congress party had to rid itself of its dependence on a single family. Rahul Gandhi had a right to be in politics, but not to assume that only he or his mother would be the most powerful person in their party;

Second, the Bharatiya Janata Party had to rid itself of its dependence on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh,...

The most admired human being on the planet may be a one-time boxer named Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. To spend three decades in prison fighting racial oppression, and then guide and oversee the peaceful transition to a multi-racial democracy, surely ranks as the greatest personal achievement since the end of the Second World War.

For the capaciousness of his vision and the generosity of his spirit, Nelson Mandela has sometimes been compared to Mahatma Gandhi. Like Gandhi, Mandela is both a recon...