J Sri Raman

Many were bound to miss the brief report. It was buried under all those stories of scams and the Cricket World Cup tournament (just about a week away), with the Indian Premier League event blending the game and Bollywood glamour, not far behind. But the report — about far less beautiful and powerful (as well […]

Deafening has been the run-up to India’s Republic Day on January 26. The weeks-long din in parliament, designed to weaken and paralyse the county’s chosen system of democracy, was bad enough. The camp of religious-communal politics made it worse with a high-decibel campaign on Kashmir, always a reliably divisive issue in their repertoire, to culminate […]

True, India has no blasphemy laws. But does it have no Aasia Bibis? No Indian court has sent a man or woman of Aasia’s religion to death for the crime she is alleged to have committed. Does the country, however, not have kangaroo courts of a kind that order and carry out punishments on people […]

December 24, 2010, brought a dramatic shift in India’s public discourse. For months, we had been treated to a series of scams — involving ministers, mandarins and mind-boggling amounts of the taxpayers’ money, besides tycoons and some media stars tangled in tapes of confidential conversations. Christmas Eve, however, brought news of a crucifixion. This came […]

“The most important lesson that the outgoing year teaches us is that India cannot afford to have a government in which the prime minister has no real authority, and the leader who has the authority has no accountability…[The events of 2008] have taught an important lesson to India: to have a strong leader.”That was the […]

Even two swallows may not make a summer. But the couple of high-profile half-pronouncements of political retirement heard over the past week promise many more such resolutions from a class of India’s celebrity citizens that few associate with renunciation.I know this putative titan in the terminal stage of his political career has kept returning to […]

I have, for years, been a strong advocate of democracy, primarily inspired by my experience with American freedoms. As a Muslim who speaks his mind and asks critical questions, I am routinely threatened and maligned by those who, unable to cope with reason and critique, seek to silence me. American democracy gave me the protection […]

Physicians had better stay busy healing themselves than try and tend the poor and sick in India’s tribal areas. That would seem to be the moral of this tale of two healers. In January 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines, who had been serving lepers in a tribal area of the eastern state of Orissa for […]