Articles from the author

There is a serious proposal in certain academic circles to hold a trial of Lord Mountbatten, inviting scholars from Pakistan and Great Britain to participate in it.

You name a scam. We have it. There is no segment of life that we have not polluted. Defence deals, telecommunication contracts, fi-scal jugglery and, more recently, the allotment of petrol pumps – the list is endless.

The BJP's (Bharatiya Janata Party) landslide victory in Gujarat has come days ahead of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's 78th birthday on December 25. The party, Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad – all fought the elections in their own way.

Will Indian politics take a different turn in 2003? This question has become relevant today because of the BJP's victory in Gujarat, where the contest was between secularism and anti-minority phobia. Bigotry won hands down.

Back-seat driving, anyone will tell you, is dangerous. It confuses the driver and can cause accidents. Even then, the worst that can happen is a few mangled bodies and the destruction of the vehicle. But back-seat driving in governance is a disaster.

It could have been worse. This is how a legal luminary in Delhi reacted to the Supreme Court's judgement on the Minority Educational Institutions. The verdict was, indeed, close: 6-5.

In the fifties there was a poet in communist ruled Hungary, who said: "We are living in cannibal times." I was reminded of the observation the other day when an eyewitness said that the Ansal Plaza shootout at Delhi was no encounter but a straight murder of the two ill-fed, unarmed men.

Gujarat is not the end of the world. I doubt whether the voters would favour Chief Minister Narendra Modi who has lowered not only their spiralling economic growth but also their image.

Surely this is not the type of governance that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wants his party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), to flaunt in Gujarat or elsewhere in the country.

It is the police again in Gujarat. Is something wrong with police training in India? At a seminar of top police officials at the National Police Academy in Hyderabad I once posed a question: Why didn't you ever introspect to find out what went wrong during the emergency when you acted as mere instruments of tyranny in the hands of Indira Gandhi's regime?

Dear Reader, <br /> I am looking for Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the person whom I have known - or at least I had thought so - for nearly 35 years. He was liberal, open and by no stretch of the imagination pro-Hindutva.

In the history of a political party, there comes a moment which it believes is momentous. More often it is not. The action it takes under the misconception has often resulted in the withering of the party.