I had my first close encounter with Mr. Narendra Modi in the late 1990s, sometime before he was parachuted into Ahmedabad as the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s choice as the new chief minister of Gujarat. He had accompanied RSS chief Kuppahalli Sudarshan, now dead, to the office of the Catholic BishopsContinue Reading

When George Orwell wrote his celebrated novel ‘1984’, he perhaps never realised that India would actually be witnessing a series of events in 1984 which include the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the genocide on the Sikhs which followed and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. ‘The party leader’, in hisContinue Reading

In the run-up to the General Elections of 2004, the ruling BJP and their allies in the NDA, coined a slogan ‘India Shining’. That ‘India Shining’ campaign was basically a massive cover up for a whole range of misdeeds which included growing intolerance and attacks on the minorities culminating inContinue Reading