Is there now a winning team?
FOR India’s opposition, the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s now known that a key witness against Kejriwal donated a tidy…
More ‘Moditva’
THE impressive logistics of India’s national elections inspire considerable international coverage. This year, the process initiated last Friday will culminate at the start of June, and the potential electorate includes…
Fable of the bicycle and a plane
THE inability to accept defeat with grace comes from an authoritarian streak found in enfeebled democracies. Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, for example, are peas in a pod in this…
Did she slip up with emergency?
JUNE 25 marked the anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s 21-month 1975-77 emergency. The 50-year-old event came up for censure in the Lok Sabha Speaker’s and president Draupadi Murmu’s address to the…
Deniable truths
THEY are all dead: the feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and her 14 interviewees — prominent amongst them Henry Kissinger, King Hussein of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Mrs Golda Meir, Indira…
A Rubik’s Cube
IF you can recall the Rubik’s Cube, you are a child of the 1980s. Its inventor Ernő Rubik (a Hungarian professor of architecture) perfected his brainchild in 1979, intending it…
Is India’s judiciary up for the fight?
OBSERVERS around the world were not necessarily being malicious — with the exception of Winston Churchill — in thinking that India might not last as a democracy for too long…
Land of constitutional frauds
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law” — Óscar R. Benavides THE spectre of violence and chaos haunts Pakistan. Never before in Pakistan’s history have three types of…
What’s in a name?
PAKISTAN holds an unusual pack of cards. It has no kings. They have been either deposed, exiled, assassinated, or hanged. It has no queens. One potential qualifier Miss Fatima Jinnah…
Crimson chronicles
THE dead die when ceremony replaces memory. Ask the souls of those millions who sacrificed their lives throughout the history of human conflict. They lie interred beneath the earth they…
