Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 14

Why Liberals Must Support A Common Civil Code, The Telegraph

Thirty years ago this fortnight, the Supreme Court passed its famous judgment in the Shah Bano case. A Muslim man had divorced his wife and stopped providing for her maintenance. The brave woman fought the injustice all the way to the highest court of the land. Finally, on the 23rd of April 1985, a five judge bench headed by the Chief Justice endorsed her claim, upholding an earlier judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that she be provided an allowance sufficient for her needs.

The Shah...

Why Liberals Must Support a Common Civil Code, The Telegraph

Thirty years ago this fortnight, the Supreme Court passed its famous judgment in the Shah Bano case. A Muslim man had divorced his wife and stopped providing for her maintenance. The brave woman fought the injustice all the way to the highest court of the land. Finally, on the 23rd of April 1985, a five judge bench headed by the Chief Justice endorsed her claim, upholding an earlier judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that she be provided an allowance sufficient for her needs.

The Shah...

The Best Indian Fielding Side Ever, Hindustan Times

As one grows older, one forgets what happened last week or last month. But memories from one’s youth stay for ever. I can see, as I write, Alvin Kallicharan trying to on-drive Bishan Bedi in the Delhi Test of 1974. He gets a leading edge, and, as the ball balloons up into the off-side, I hear the bowler shout: ‘Brijesh!’, the urgency of the plea carried through the air to where I sit, at the top of the Ferozeshah Kotla’s aam admi stand.

In that Indian side of 1974 there were five men who cou...

Judging The Judges, The Telegraph

Here, in full, is a recent news item in a New Delhi newspaper: ‘When former Chief Justice of India and current Kerala Governor P Sathasivam came to Delhi to attend the wedding reception of BJP chief Amit Shah, he also reached out to various government functionaries to explore the possibility of a Delhi posting — either as Lieutenant Governor or National Human Rights Commission chairperson. While there is lot of speculation that the government could bring in a new face as Delhi LG, the top pos...

Two Leaders and Their Parties, The Telegraph

I visit Delhi half a dozen times a year. I was most recently there from February 5th to 11th, to fulfil commitments made several months ago, these fortuitously coinciding with the casting and counting of votes in the Delhi elections. Naturally, all my conversations, with friends and strangers alike, were about their party preferences in the capital and beyond.

Much of the commentary on the Delhi elections of February 2015 has framed it as a battle of David versus Goliath, these standing for...

How Gandhi’s Martyrdom Saved India, Hindustan Times

On the 31st of January 1948, a former Indian Civil Service officer named Malcolm Darling, then living in retirement in London, wrote in his diary: ‘Gandhi was assassinated yesterday. … Very difficult to say what will happen, but it is as if a ship has lost its keel. Further disintegration seems inevitable, and what happens to the 40 million Muslims left in India now, now that they have lost their chief protector? … I wonder if sooner or later we will have to go back.’

By the standards of his t...

Seven Threats To Freedom Of Expression, The Telegraph

India, I have long maintained, is a fifty-fifty democracy. In some respects—such as free and fair elections, free movement of people—we are as democratic as any other country in the world. In other respects we lag noticeably behind. One such area is the freedom of expression.

The first threat to freedom of expression is the retention on our statute books of archaic colonial laws. In his now notorious case against Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the RSS activist Dinana...

History As Myth Myth As History, Hindustan Times

In the early years of this century, people—within and outside India—began speaking of our country emerging as a ‘knowledge superpower’. The proximate reason for this was the country’s then rising software industry.

As that sturdy bellwether of the conventional wisdom, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, wrote in 2005, India, once ‘known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa’, was being ‘recalibrated’ as ‘a country of brainy people and computer wizards’. This ‘recali...

Wealth and Power in Modern India, New Republic

Book Review of “Capital: The Eruption of Delhi”, Rana Dasgupta, Penguin Press.

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The novelist and critic U. R. Ananthamurthy once said that India lives simultaneously in the twelfth and the twenty-first centuries. He might have added: and all the centuries in-between.

No city better exemplifies Ananthamurthy’s maxim than the country’s capital, Delhi. The three port cities of Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai were given shape by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries. On the other hand, Delhi, whi...

Why Women Are So Unsafe In Our Cities, Hindustan Times

Some twenty years ago, a friend from Mumbai and I were discussing how women were treated in our cities. We both agreed that women were most unsafe in New Delhi, where the hostility to them took both verbal and physical forms. In Kolkata, Chennai, and Ahmedabad, women were rarely abused or attacked in public, so long as they conformed to certain roles. They had to dress and act demurely, in keeping with what was recognized as Bengali or Tamil or Gujarati culture.

My friend and I congratulated...