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The vilification of Lord Macaulay: will capitalism suffer the same fate?

By Chandra Bhan Prasad
11.19.2007

By most accounts, all Indians now regard democracy as the ideal political system for India, but I would like to argue that that consensus is not quite valid, especially when it comes to challenging the caste order.

The large majority of politicians, political theorists as well as the general public often speak of an Indian way of democracy as distinct from Western democracy, but this thinking has an undercurrent of contempt against the entire Western value system.

Putting Muslim Personal Law in Perspective

By Barbara Metcalf
10.23.2007

The need to be vigilant about unconscious prejudice and ill-formed stereotypes about Muslims is critical in today’s world, not least in India where Muslims comprise such a significant proportion of the citizenry and where tragic episodes of anti-Muslim violence have taken place since Independence in 1947.

Some recent reports have revealed perhaps startling indications of the extent to which Muslim Indians lag in relation to their fellow citizens in economic level, education, and representation in key public sectors as well as in management positions in private businesses.

Media without Journalism?

By Sevanti Ninan
08.06.2007

The media are expanding in India at a frenetic rate with new television channels and newspapers debuting almost every month. But the question to ask in the face of all this growth is, can the country's journalism keep pace? Media is an industry, journalism a vocation, and nurturing it is not easy in a country where aspiration and upward mobility is fuelling the demand for media. The group editor of one of the two most widely read newspapers in the country, Shravan Garg of Dainik Bhaskar, summed up the change when he said at a public forum in New Delhi in May, "Earlier the relationship was one of newspaper and reader, now it is of product and consumer."

Reservations and the Dalits at the Crossroads

By Christophe Jaffrelot
05.08.2007

India's Dalits (the former "untouchables") have risen considerably since Independence. The country has had Dalit chief ministers (such as Mayawati), Dalit ministers in the central government (beginning with Ambedkar as early as 1947), Dalit party presidents (like Bangaru Laxman of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Jagjivan Ram of the Congress), and one Dalit President of the Republic (K.R. Narayanan). Last year for the first time a Dalit (K.G. Balakrishnan) became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This is all the more remarkable as the judiciary is one of the few Indian institutions without an affirmative action policy. Recently, Dalits have also acquired new positions of power in the university system, with S.K. Thorat at the helm of the University Grant Commission, and Narendra Jhadav as the vice chancellor of the University of Pune. This is a remarkable achievement that requires an explanation.