Delayed Justice

Centre’s decision to award a compensation package totaling Rs 330 crores to the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots can at best be described as a pre-election effort at applying a healing touch.

Fake Killings: People as Trophies

The manner in which the fake killing(s) have snowballed into a major embarassment for the ’invincible looking’ Modi regime is for everyone to see.

Martial Myths

Modi’s Men and their Mean Machines

Every illegal religious shrine ought to be demolished. Yet, I wish to know how a 200-year-old dargah of a Sufi saint qualifies as being ‘illegal’, is bulldozed and leads to mob violence. Gujarat is becoming an experimental lab for the Hindu Ra

Church Lures Gujarat Tribals to Christ

Poverty is forcing the tribal community to embrace Christianity

The State of the World and other ruminations

’Our Shiv Sena’

Is it a case of the Stockholm syndrome working late? As a young wife and mother she was a victim, ever fearful, of the terror of the Shiv Sena in Bombay. And the real fear of physical attacks. Thirty years later, she called the Sena “ours.”

The Soldier who Annexed 3 States for 3 Daughters

A veteran of both the 1965 and the 1971 wars against Pakistan, retired Hawaldaar Ramaiah was a fat man with a handle bar moustache that his wife trimmed in the night while he was asleep.

Destinies, dynasties, and upstart pickpockets

We had stepped into another zone of assault; another variation of the mini theatre where Indian regional identities, destinies and politics clashed...

Manto Strikes

The smoke had reached an alarming proportion, and the whole chawl would be up in a minute, since chawls have a habit of being burnt down before one can say “damn your blouse.”

The Covered Trucks

PART II - We left Vapi the next morning, March 3. We started out towards Nasik, back into Maharashtra. Nasik was a four hour ride through rugged low lying bald hills, taking the full blast of the March sun’s fury blazing away...

Intimacies Remapped

Part one of a series on my travel through a major part of India during the Gujarat riots ... my journey away from the blood and gore of riots to questioning my role, and the roles of others like me, in an India seemingly fast polarising along communal lin

Zaheera’s Jihad

Her bravery is forgotten, she is called an opportunist.Who made her into a star witness and what was the underlying agenda? Modi becomes a star symbol for the death of 2000 people, why is no one pointing fingers at him?

“Final” solution?

Review of Rakesh Sharma’s documentary, Final Solution: It is a study of the politics of hate in India, examining the Hindu Extremist movement, a look at their ideology and methodology, and the genocide they conducted in Gujarat.

Meenakshi

This is how Meenu or Meenakshi spent each day of her life – an enchanted blissful existence filled with family love, in a small town of Godhra till the gruesome riots of 2002 broke out and in one fell swoop, all was lost…

Iraq : Is religion above board?

101 reasons for the war. Which of the ones thrown at us do we believe is true?

They Shoot Kashmiri Pandits, Dont They?

They say they will act as a “buffer against the export of jehad into India”. They who ran away?

Gujrat - The Verdict Of God

Muslims in India: Communalism vs. Backwardness-Minority Syndrome

Today, it is imperative that the Muslim community fights the ogre of communalism

Is It A War On Islam?

What, then, should be the strategy for all those who believe in a just world and are appalled by America's war on the weak?

The Unmaking Of Gujrat

The key players in these elections and therefore Indian polity seem like characters in a drama of the absurd.

The Hindu Right

Advani’s yathra in an air-conditioned Toyota left a trail of blood in its wake

The Right To Bigotry

as long as government and courts and police and diplomats and moralists approve of it

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death

I have a dream for South Asia

Cry, the Beloved Country

There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me

An Equal Reaction

We don’t know WHAT happened at Godhra

A Journey Into Afghanistan

Aside to President Bush: Afghans have been conquered and made to submit by only two men

Eathquake Hits India And Pakistan

At least 15,000 people are feared dead