Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 9

The Resource That Will Determine Our Future, Hindustan Times

The ecologist Jayanta Bandyopadhyay once wrote that water, not oil, was the resource whose availability and quality would determine India’s future. I recalled that remark when reading a report recently submitted to the Government of India, entitled, A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms. Rigorously researched and closely agued, this report displays a deep familiarity with social and economic life across India, and offers a set of forward-looking recommendations a...

The Political Career Of Sonia Gandhi, The Telegraph

A line often quoted by columnists, and attributed to the British politician and writer Enoch Powell is this: ‘All political lives end in failure’. The full form of the quote reads: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

The abbreviated form of the quote applies forcefully to four former Prime Ministers of India: Jawaharlal Nehru, P. V. Narasimha Rao,  Atal Behari Vajpayee, an...

Rediscovering One’s Land, The Telegraph

On the second day of 2017, I drove from the colonial hill station of Coonoor to the great old port city of Kochi. Thus began a month of almost continuous travel, in which I took many flights, but also spent long stretches on the road, seeing the land from up on high and from  the ground as well. I descended from the mountains to the plains, stayed in large cities and small towns, saw or stopped in numerous villages, and even touched the majestic Indian Ocean.

As a student in school and colleg...

When Eleven Women Of Bengal Took On Gandhi, The Telegraph

While working in the archives of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, I came across a fascinating letter to Gandhi, sent by eleven young women of Calcutta. The letter was undated, but it appeared to have been written in January 1939. It was addressed to ‘Most revered Mahatmaji’, and was signed individually by the eleven women, all Hindus by their names. The letter was written in protest against an essay written by Gandhi for his journal Harijan. Gandhi’s article, said these women, was ‘not very...

The Best Player Not To Play For India, Hindustan Times

This winter India play thirteen Test matches at home. The last time they played so many was back in 1979-80, when two in three Indians now alive were unborn.

This (to me) welcome superabundance of Test cricket has sparked many conversations about what, the popularity of T20 notwithstanding, remains the highest and most satisfying form of the game. In one such conversation, a cricket fan in his thirties asked me; ‘Who was the best cricketer never to play for India?’ He himself thought it must...

A Contemporary View Of Nehru and Patel, Hindustan Times

My home town, Bengaluru, has the country’s best second-hand bookstores. For decades now, they have sustained me in a personal and professional sense, providing materials for my bed-time reading as well as rare documents for my research.

In one of these stores I recently picked up an old book that served both purposes. This was A. S. Iyengar’s All Through the Gandhian Era, published in 1950. As a journalist, Iyengar interviewed every Viceroy from Chelmsford onwards, and knew, often intimately,...

A Privileged Peep Into Gandhi’s Inbox, The Telegraph

Mohandas K. Gandhi’s own writings are well known to the world: through a series of books and anthologies under his name that appeared in his lifetime; and, more authoritatively and substantively, through the ninety-seven volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, published between 1958 and 1994, and put together and lovingly edited by a team of scholars headed by K. Swaminathan and C. N. Patel.

These Collected Works are a vital resource for present and future assessments of Gandhi the...

Why We Must Listen To JP On Kashmir, Hindustan Times

On the 4th of October 1966—almost exactly fifty years ago—the great Indian democrat Jayaprakash Narayan spoke at a seminar on Kashmir held in New Delhi. The Valley was in turmoil; the popular leader Sheikh Abdullah was under arrest, and the State Government was widely believed to be both incompetent and corrupt. ‘JP’ began his talk by clearly stating that this was a dispute between ‘the government of India and the people of the state’. JP believed that Pakistan had no locus standi in Kashmir,...

A Modest Proposal To Improve Governance, Hindustan Times

The Harvard economist Lant Pritchett has called India a ‘flailing state’. The signs are all around us; in the decaying government schools and the declining public hospitals, in the apathy and incompetence of the police, in the shocking state of our roads and transport systems, in the fouling of our air and water. There is also abundant statistical proof of how Central and State Governments are failing citizens; in the Annual State of Education Reports issued by Pratham, for example, or in the...

How Mining Corrodes Democracy, The Telegraph

When the new millennium dawned, the poster boy of economic liberalization in my home state, Karnataka, was N. R. Narayana Murthy. A man from a middle-class home, with no tradition of entrepreneurship in his family, Narayana Murthy got together with six other like-minded individuals to found a company named Infosys. Starting from modest beginnings in Puné, by the year 2000 the company was headquartered in an impressive campus in Bengaluru, with offices around India and in many other countries...