The divide over Diwali as an exclusively Hindu festival has deepened every year. “Battle at Lanka, Ramayana”, by Sahib Din. Udaipur, 1649-1653. | in public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It was the evening before Diwali. Dusk was just falling. A friend, returning from his evening walk, saw a man lighting firecrackers with his young son. On…
The bulldozer drives in BJP-led states are not anti-poor move but a communal targeting of Muslims, aimed at making them secondary citizens of the country. A bulldozer razes a shop in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri. | PTI The decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been marked by a battery of mortal assaults on India’s constitutional…
DY Chandrachud raises troubling questions by publicly professing that religious beliefs, not the Constitution, influenced the Ayodhya judgement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Chief Justice DY Chandrachud’s home for the Ganesh festival. | X/Narendra Modi In the history of free India, the Supreme Court of India has authored many momentous rulings. Some ushered in regimes of…
The patriarch of the Hindutva organisation misses entirely the Constitution’s core principles of justice, liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism. RSS @RSSorg/X As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh enters the 100th year of its formation, why is it imperative to listen attentively to the words, spoken and unspoken, of Mohan Madhukar Rao Bhagwat, the Sarsangchalak or supreme…
Unless the judiciary punishes those in public office who destroy the rule of law and morality of the Constitution, court ‘guidelines’ will be empty gestures. BJP workers celebrate the party’s victory in four state elections in March 2022. | PTI When the history of our times is written, a paramount marker of Narendra Modi’s first…
A new report explains why there is little hope for a quick return to peace in the state. Manipuris in Chennai hold a peace demonstration in solidarity with the people of their home state on July 9. | R.Satish Babu / AFP As Prime Minister Narendra Modi rose to address the newly elected 18th Lok…
“The project is that this is a Hindu land that belongs to Hindu people and Muslims are outsiders. And India has to bring an end to these thousand years of slavery,” author of the book ‘Shikwah-e-Hind: The Political Future of Indian Muslims’ Mujibur Rehman told The Wire in an interview. Representational image of an Indian…
With its history of stoking communal violence, the Sangh is antithetical to the values of the Constitution, which civil servants swear allegiance to first. Narendra Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat, and former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, gesture at Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh meeting near Ahmedabad in September 2009. | AFP When in 1980, I first…
Inspired by the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, hateful Hindutva embargoes have remained similar in content and even language from the 1930s to the present. Man with a placard that reads “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” during the Nazi campaign to boycott Jewish shops and businesses in Berlin in April 1933. | In public…
The nightmare has commenced again – a nightmare in a loop. A protest against the lynching Mohammad Akhlaq, in Mumbai in October 2015. | AFP Ten years of Narendra Modi’s leadership since 2014 witnessed the steady metamorphosis of India into a republic of hate and fear. Lynching, genocidal hate speech and bulldozers became the chilling…