Articles

‘What was predictable, but entirely missed by Modi’s strident critics, is that the excessive and intemperate demonisation of Modi allowed him to assume his own metaphor — the underdog, the martyr, the marginalised,’ says Dr Aseem Shukla. As the newly anointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi ascended the steps of India’s Parliament for the first time [...]

The artist Anish Kapoor was one of the signatories to banning Narendra Modi from Britain. Yet his attack on the now prime minister of India was extreme even by the standards of those who opposed Modi. It was fanatical, venomous and very psychologically imbalanced. On BBC Newsnight on 16 May 2014 Kapoor said Modi was [...]

After the Hindu victory with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, what we now have to guard against, is that, instead of an intelligent pro-Hindu policy with lasting positive effects, counterproductive feel-good policies are enacted. From a distance, Modi seems bright enough to ward off these tendencies, but much depends on the people he will surround himself with. At any [...]

The election of Narendra Modi as the choice for millions in the world’s largest democracy is a bit galling to those whose concept of ‘democratic’ resembles Lenin’s armed force against the elected government of Alexander Kerensky in revolutionary Russia. Yet even before Modi’s election in what proved to be a pivotal moment in Indian democracy [...]

Narendra Modi’s victory needs to be understood beyond the two commonly heard positions we have heard these past few months leading up to the election. Critics of Mr. Modi’s saw his rise as the march of Hindu nationalist fascism and the inevitable death of secularism in India. Supporters of Mr. Modi saw his rise as [...]

In March 2005, the United States denied a visa to Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, now the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate in next year’s Indian elections. The visa was denied because of Mr. Modi’s alleged role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat that left more than 1,000 dead, most of them Muslims. But it [...]

A day after a religious leader, Swami Adhokshjanand Devtirath announced to campaign against Narendra Modi in Varanasi, Swami Nischalananda Saraswati today claimed that he is the recognised Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Govardhan Math in Puri and has not made any statement against any candidate.“To gain politically, a person named Adhokshjanand, supported by some political parties, claiming [...]

The creation of Pakistan was to have devastating long-term consequences for world security. But the first people to suffer would be the Bengali-speaking majority in that state. In this the very western democracies who had fought Nazism and conducted the Nuremberg Trials would not just be complicit in the ensuing genocide but actively support it. [...]

“A stunted, lymphatic, yellow-faced heathen, with a mouthful of teeth three sizes too big for him, bulging slits where his eyes ought to be, blacking-brush hair, a foolish giggle, a cruel heart, and the conceit of the devil. . . . It is a grave question whether Japan. . . . is in the least [...]

Although far from uniform, the composite picture of Christianity that emerges in a number of Japanese sources from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is of a Buddhist heresy propagated by barbarians and focused around the worship of a demonic deity.28 This sect encourages loyalty to a barbarian king said to be the representative of [...]