Daily Hindu Editorials

👉In Bhopal, decades after the gas tragedy👈 I was born after an infamous incident changed a big city in India. The city survived, but it will never be the same again. That incident was the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, and I realised in 2013 that it redefined the meaning of the word ‘tragedy’ for me. When I visited old Bhopal in December that year, the glitches that I face in a city like Mumbai, such as stepping out of the house without an umbrella on a rainy day, seemed to be a part of another world. The gas tragedy, which killed thousands and has transformed the lives of millions, continues till today and I witnessed it. Around 10,000 people are estimated to have died after methyl isocyanate and other poisonous gases made their way into people’s bodies because of a gas leak. Inside the Union Carbide factory, I could not imagine the scene that would have unfolded outside: people running on the streets, bodies lying in heaps. When I saw the rusted iron rods and tankers, I di...

👉The Catalan issue is uncharted territory in global politics👈 A new chapter has begun in the Catalan independence movement. On May 17, hardline separatist leader Quim Torra was sworn in as the President of Catalonia. He pledged only to be “faithful to the people of Catalonia” and made no reference to the Spanish king, the constitution or the flag. He later declared the Catalan government’s desire to continue the push for independence. Spanish Prime Minster Mariano Rajoy reacted to Mr. Torra’s election by issuing a warning that the Spanish constitution will be upheld and unlawful activities will not be condoned. In effect, Mr. Rajoy has taken steps he sees fit to ensure that the territorial integrity of his country is maintained. Mr. Torra was elected by the narrowest of margins — 66 votes to 65. The last three times the Catalans have voted — the regional elections in 2015, the referendum in October 2017 and the regional elections in December 2017 — have all resulted in pr...

👉His legacy is an antidote to majoritarian chauvinism👈 On February 22, 1958, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru went on air to announce: “Aaj hamara Mir-e-Karavan chala gaya (today we have lost the leader of our caravan).” He was referring to India’s first Education Minister Maulana Azad who had just passed away. Azad was the youngest and the longest serving President of the Congress during the freedom struggle. Born in 1888 as Mohiuddin, he was a man of many parts. A precocious student, home-schooled and self-taught, he completed his religious curriculum at the age of 16. But his interpretation of Islam was not conventional. He believed in independent thinking based on reason and was critical of what he called “the shackles of conformity” and literal interpretations of Islamic texts. At a very early age he began a remarkable career in journalism. His writings and speeches in Urdu, unparalleled for their eloquence and sophistication, earned him the sobriquet Abul Kalam (father o...

👉The liability law and the Fukushima accident have changed India’s nuclear energy outlook👈 Twenty years ago, on May 11, 1998, India took a leap into the unknown world of nuclear weapon powers with the tests at Pokhran. Though the decision was taken after great deliberation and with preparation, how the reaction of the world would affect the future of India was unknown. But today, it is certain that the action was timely and inevitable. 👉Obstacles removed India has reason to be satisfied over having accomplished many of the objectives of Pokhran II. Indian diplomacy triumphed in turning a grave crisis into an opportunity by securing legitimacy for its nuclear arsenal and removing obstacles in generating nuclear power. But the hasty enactment of a liability law, which inhibited nuclear trade, and the setback globally to nuclear power on account of the Fukushima disaster stood in the way of India benefitting fully from Pokhran II and the subsequent agreements reached. The f...

👉During the electoral campaign, historical figures have been plucked out of rich and complex contexts👈 History has been weaponised afresh in the electoral war zone of Karnataka. What set the ball rolling was the first idiomatic reference by Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to the historic face-off between Pulakeshin II (the great Chalukyan king) and Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the early seventh century, in which the former prevented the conquest from the north. Since then, we have been witness to a kind of deep mining of Karnataka history to serve two distinct purposes: reel in the votes of specific caste communities and construct a narrative of Hindutva unity. 👉All about Tipu In the last few weeks, historical figures have been plucked out of rich and complex contexts to be beaten into swords, flintlocks, arrows, or simply blunt objects with which to bludgeon the electoral opponent. Here, the favourite (and easiest) beating boy has, predictably, been Tipu Sultan (r. 1...

👉How A.V. Meiyappa Chettiar acquired the broadcast and recording rights of the poet’s works👈 Subramania Bharati, the modern Tamil poet who attained posthumous fame and whose books remain bestsellers, may not have recognised “the © symbol that figures in the imprint pages of every published book today”. As mentioned in the prologue of historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s book Who Owns that Song? The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright, the word copyright occurs only once in Bharati’s writings, and he would have perhaps been amazed to learn that his poems could later earn money by being used in song recordings and in films. Bharati died poor, with half his works uncollected or unpublished in his lifetime. Legal battles broke out after his death — filmmakers and publishers vied to acquire copyright to his works and many people demanded that his writings be made public property. Finally, the Tamil Nadu government acquired rights to his poems and then made them available to the pu...

💥What non-alignment means to India depends on the prism through which it is viewed As the 18th mid-term ministerial meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) concluded in early April in Azerbaijan, the question of India’s non-alignment status resurfaced, even if the country’s official position on the matter has arguably remained unchanged over the years. Indeed, as a founding member of NAM, India has remained committed to the purposes and principles of the movement. The NAM question initially arose in response to the erstwhile bipolarity of political power during the Cold War years, with most nations aligning themselves to either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union spurred the question of what the essence of NAM was, and with respect to whom the NAM countries remained non-aligned. The ‘Ten principles of Bandung’, which were proclaimed in the Asian-African Conference in 1955, outlined the principles of NAM. Being th...

💥Perhaps we need to turn to art to understand the inner conflict of the Indian political tradition💥 Recent work by the Mumbai-based artist and curator, one of the founders of the Kochi Biennale, Riyas Komu interrogates our relationship with both the symbols of the state and the values that they are meant to enshrine and invoke. “Holy Shiver”, a series of works including sculptures in metal, wood and terracotta, videos, oil portraits, woodcuts, installations and archival prints, refers to the instinctive response of the body, whether animal or human, when it senses danger and enters a ‘fight or flight’ mode. Horripilation (the hair on the back of the neck standing on end), the trembling of the extremities, the tensing of muscles — these primordial physical reactions to a perceived external threat Komu uses as an allegory for how the body politic responds when confronted with the ‘other’, whoever is identified as an enemy of the ‘self’. The instinctual biological ‘shiver’ o...

☝Fifty years after his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘revolution of values’ resonates just as clearly We commonly say that historical figures are best known for their deeds. What manner of man was Martin Luther King, Jr.? To answer this question, it would be wise to first look at King’s biography for the deeds and then to his philosophy for the mind behind those deeds. Many people judge King by the story of his life, for to them this story means his deeds. Practically everything has been said about his personal and public life. However, not much has been written about his philosophy. It seems, then, that the answer to the question can be provided only by studying his intellectual evolution. 👉Struggle against injustice To study King’s philosophy is to study how he grew from being the son and grandson of a Baptist priest to a prophet of non-violence. It is from this that he derived what he later called “a revolution of values” in American society. Revolution...

💥Stephen Hawking lost most of his bets, but beat all the odds to take physics forward and to the people  Stephen Hawking had a rich history with bets; particularly losing them. The best known was the one with Caltech (California Institute of Technology) cosmologist Kip Thorne, about the existence of black holes, which was in many ways at the heart of Hawking’s scientific success. Cygnus X1 was a mysterious galactic source of X-rays and appeared to be a black hole. It was the first time that physical evidence for one seemed to be on the horizon. Hawking said this was unlikely and Thorne — later on scientific consultant to Interstellar — was certain it was. Fifteen years down, in 1990, Hawking conceded defeat and gifted Thorne the wager, a year’s worth of Penthouse magazines. He later on bet Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t be able to detect the Higgs boson, the ‘God particle’ that is one of the foundational bricks on which the standard...

💥India’s intervention achieved strategic objectives while maintaining a humanitarian veneer India liberated Bangladesh in 1971. The Bangladesh freedom fighters were no match militarily for the Pakistan army and there was enough residual support for the idea of Pakistan in its eastern wing to preclude a clear-cut separation of the two wings. India’s intervention was altruistic only in small part. It was primarily based on realpolitik. First, the Bengali uprising provided India with the “opportunity of the century”, to quote India’s leading strategic thinker, the late K. Subrahmanyam, to break up Pakistan and thus eliminate the threat of a two-front war in any future confrontation. Although the eastern front remained largely inactive in 1965, it tied down substantial military resources that could have been deployed to greater effect in the western theatre. Second, Indian decision-makers concluded that even if the new country in the east would not be an “eternal ally”, it could ne...

To understand the history of the modern Indian mind is to learn how Indians understand historical memory On December 1, 1881, the British governor of Bombay, James Fergusson, informed the residents of that city that from that day onwards, “Madras time shall be kept in all offices under the control of Government and shall be held to be the official time for all purposes.” Madras time was about 40 minutes ahead of Bombay’s local time. What followed that decision was great acrimony, letter-writing campaigns, and newspaper editorials that bemoaned the rise of confusion over which time to follow where. Meanwhile, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce convinced the Bombay university to hold a referendum on whether the clock tower should display Madras or Bombay time. Predictably, there was no surprise. The vote was to show Bombay time and, like petty bureaucrats, the Fergusson administration cut off funds to light the clock at night for displaying “unofficial time”. It...

Since over a million years ago, the Indian region has not been deserted at any time In 1863, British geologist and archaeologist Robert Bruce Foote discovered the first Palaeolithic stone tools from India at the Attirampakkam site, close to Madras. Since then, this site has been visited by many investigators, and considerably more knowledge about the civilisation has been obtained. It was believed until recently that modern human ancestors moved out of Africa and settled in various places where they left their mark by introducing small tools, around 140,000-120,000 years ago. However, a recent paper published in Nature, ‘Early Middle Palaeolithic culture in India around 385-172 ka reframes Out of Africa models’, by Akhilesh Kumar, Shanti Pappu and others, has revealed stunning new evidence that small tools — as opposed to larger ones that characterised early human species — were being made at this site way before — nearly 385,000 years ago. Does this the...

In democracies, citizens have a right to know why, where and how the government spends public money. Each year we, therefore, await the Prime Minister’s response to the President’s address in the Budget session of Parliament. This year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech was less about the financial implications of the intended policies of his government, and more about blaming the Congress for the disasters that track Indians since 1947. In the process, he neatly sidestepped the basic obligation he owes us: accountability. Equally troubling is his rather rash allegation that the Congress was responsible for the partition of the country, and for the division of Jammu and Kashmir. We know that representations of history tend to wander far away from actual events, and even construct them. But Mr. Modi’s explanation of the Partition has little to do with one of the most catastrophic divisions of territory and people in the subcontinent. It has more to do with a ...

On the iconic sculpture in Cave 5 of the Udayagiri caves in Vidisha Religious architecture forms a major portion of India’s built heritage. These structures are not only unwritten documents of history, they are also stamps of the might of the rulers who built them and articulations of grand visions. Secular and religious structures are products of their location — the material used to build them depended on what was available to the kings and workers at that time. They were also a reflection of the piety of the artisans and workers, for nothing else can explain the hard work that went into cutting through solid natural rock to carve out temples and spectacular sculptures. Rock-cut architecture never fails to awe me with all its majesty, precision, and intricate detail. The earliest rock-cut architecture is from the Mauryan dynasty, but the Ajanta caves, which I had visited a few decades ago and which left me awestruck, are among the earliest rock-cut temples. The Udayagi...

The first runner-up was the committee deciding whether ‘Padmavati’ distorts history I don’t know about you but I’ve been busy this past week celebrating India’s latest triumph at UNESCO. Having already bagged the UNESCO awards for Best Prime Minister in the World, Best National Anthem in the World, and Best Currency Note in the World (which we won for the GPS-enabled Rs. 2,000 note), India has won in yet another category: Most Intelligent Committee in the World. As expected, all the three finalists were from India. The second runner-up was the government committee set up last year to study how people who drink cow urine can enjoy many health benefits, such as freedom from diseases and gas. It is still going strong, with the panellists engaged in intense research to sniff out new merits of cow dung. Titling the film The first runner-up was the special panel of historians and royals convened by the censor board to investigate whether the film Padmavati , ...