Ashok Malik

Jan 27, 2011
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Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com

Presidents and precedent

President Pratibha Patil ends her term in very much the foggy environment in which she began it. When she was chosen as the Congress nominee for Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2007, there were murmurs of dissent. Did this middle-ranking state politician, with a rather undistinguished career, deserve to be India’s President, let alone its first woman President? Stories of her family’s implication in local intrigues in Maharashtra and Jalgaon — Ms Patil’s native town — started to do the rounds. It all seemed very messy.

Nostalgia noose

Arresting a Jadavpur University (JU) professor for emailing an innocuous cartoon that poked fun at Mamata Banerjee is just indefensible.

Two easy diners at 7, Race Course

Despite fervid attempts by the usual suspects and impressionable sections of the media, the government and the Prime Minister’s Office have resorted to an appreciable degree of expectations management

An Indian story we don’t hear often

This past week Dilip Tirkey became one of India’s unlikeliest MPs, being elected to the Rajya Sabha from his native Orissa as a Biju Janata Dal (BJD) candidate. A few months past his 34th birthday, Mr Tirkey is among the youngest members of the House of Elders. He is a tribal (adivasi) and a Christian, adding to the pan-Orissa social alliance the BJD seeks to represent in Parliament. Said to be a charming man, Mr Tirkey’s nomination is certainly a welcome innovation by his party.

No goodbyes in India

Greg Chappell, former Australian cricketer and once coach of the Indian cricket team, has made several disparaging remarks about Indians and the Indian way of cricket and life. Some of these remarks are unfair and clearly over the top. Yet there is one point Chappell has made that is not easy to dismiss. Indians, he argues, are not leaders and do not take the responsibility that comes with leadership.

Battle of Awadh & the ruler of Bengal

On March 6, the results of the Uttar Pradesh elections will be known. Watching them closely will be a person whose party has put up a few candidates in the northern state but who otherwise has only a peripheral interest in the Hindi heartland: Mamata Banerjee. The Trinamul Congress leader and West Bengal chief minister is anticipating a poor performance by the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and reckoning this will trigger a chain of events that may lead to an early Lok Sabha election.

The Modi business

Depending on how you saw him, George Wallace was one of the most colourful, charismatic or controversial politicians in the turbulent America of the 1960s. A native of Alabama, in the racially divided south of the country, he began life as a liberal but lost his first election because his opponent successfully projected him as somebody out of tune with local (white) convictions and prejudices. Wallace then adopted a harder persona and was elected the Democrat governor in 1963. Eventually, he was to serve four terms as Alabama’s highest-ranked public official.

The banned critics of faltering India

Alexander Campbell was a Scotsman who served in the 1950s as Time magazine’s correspondent in New Delhi. In 1958, he wrote a book called The Heart of India, which was seen as so repulsive and diabolical that the government banned it in March 1959.
Campbell also wrote travelogues called The Heart of Africa and The Heart of Japan. He is now a forgotten man. Yet the ban, immutable and constant, stays exactly where it is. Has anybody read the book in the past 53 years to understand why it was banned and whether it is still worthy of being denied to Indian readers?

The China syndrome

In October this year, India commemorates the 50th anniversary of the war with China. That defining conflict of 1962 — with its military humiliation and crippling of Jawaharlal Nehru — still haunts this country. Its memory triggers a whole range of often conflicting emotions about China — from fear to wariness, obstinacy to hostility.

Wishes & horses

When one makes a wish list on January 1, at the start of a new year and a clean page, one also mentally draws a road map to achieve goals on that list. As India begins its journey into 2012, after a twisted and tortured 2011, its wish list for the coming 12 months must comprise just one, compelling word: governance. It needs governance, desperately. It needs leadership, political acumen, policy clarity, an administration that takes charge, a Prime Minister who does not look like he’s sleepwalking and a Cabinet that is not forever pointing fingers.

Sunday’s celebration of Parliament’s completion of 60 years — first at special sittings of the two Houses and then at a joint sitting in the Central Hall — were entirely understandable, even inspiring

The third US-India Strategic Dialogue is only a few weeks away. To prepare the ground for a meaningful set of talks US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was recently in the country.

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