Faced with the unrelenting juggernaut of manufactured hyper-nationalism and majoritarian fundamentalism from the powerful political right, the response of India’s largest national opposition political party, the Indian National Congress, has for long been unsteady, confused and lacking in the courage of its convictions.
Punjab has lost one generation to militancy, and the next generation to drugs. I hear this lament over and over again, whenever I travel into Punjab. The drugs problem is one of many faces of a deeply troubled society.
In Mewat, Haryana, the traditional cheer of Eid ul Zuha was muted this year, overcast by clouds of fear. Four out of five residents of the district are Muslims. Outside Jammu and Kashmir, Mewat has the highest ratio of Muslim residents except Dhubri in Assam.
Twenty five years ago, on July 24, 1991, Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh rose in Parliament to present a budget speech that was to alter the destinies of India and its people in fundamental ways.
Three men have been marched to the gallows in recent years in India. All three were convicted of terror crimes. By contrast, I cannot recall a single person awarded the death penalty for communal violence since Independence.
My mother was forced to leave behind the city of her birth, Rawalpindi, when she was just 18 because of the tumultuous ruptures of Partition. She had never returned. When she was to turn 75, I thought the best gift I could give her was to take her, if it was at all possible, to the city and to the home in which she was born.
Menacing clouds have gathered earlier as well over the picturesque lake city of Bhopal. Clouds of dangerous, even criminal, public malfeasance. In the winter of 1984, the people of the city endured the world’s worst industrial disaster in history.
Although catastrophic communal massacres recur from time to time, the Indian State has never appointed truth and reconciliation commissions.
This blistering summer of 2016, two years have passed since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triumphantly assumed office, heading the first Bharatiya Janata Party-led national government with a comfortable majority in Parliament.
In Mewat, Haryana, the traditional cheer of Eid ul Zuha was muted this year, overcast by clouds of fear. Four out of five residents here are Muslims. Mewat, recently renamed Nuh, is one of the poorest districts of Haryana.