Lotus could bloom in UP
Predicting the outcome of an Uttar Pradesh election can be injurious to health. In 1993, extensively covering a UP election for the first time, when my editor asked me...
Oh, to be 21 again
A young woman spoke out against the politics of hate, on friendship with Pakistan, on seeking peace not war. Within minutes she was attacked by the soldiers of nationalism....
Today Narendra, tomorrow Devendra?
One of the first press conferences I covered as a rookie reporter was of Bal Thackeray and Pramod Mahajan in the late 1980s announcing their decision to contest elections...
UP: ten takeaways
It’s the half way mark in the crucial election battle in UP. It is impossible to accurately predict a 20 crore state’s voting preferences after a few visits, but...
The UP Muslim ‘vote bank’ predicament
The complicated and controversial notion of a Muslim vote bank stretches back to the first general elections in 1952. The post-Partition face of the Indian Muslims, Maulana Azad, was...
Congress will remain a C team player
Five years is an eternity in Indian politics. As Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav beamed beatifically into the cameras last weekend, the mind was thrown back to 2012 when...
It’s now ‘Modi vs All’
The BJP and the Shiv Sena were once seen as ‘natural allies’ but life for the original saffron alliance is not quite the same in the age of Narendra...
Will politics shrink in 2017?
We live, to put it mildly, in “interesting times”. This is an age where TV family serials have given way to political soap operas: Are Akhilesh and Mulayam at...
Happy New Year!
A few days ago, while on vacation, I got a throat viral. Illness on holiday can be a real bummer: you can’t really enjoy the good times when your...
Has Modi done an Indira?
Last month in an interview I asked Congress president Sonia Gandhi if she would concede that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a similar personality to Indira Gandhi, tough and...