A G Noorani-Frontline

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Indian paramilitary soldiers patrol a street vandalised in the violence in North East Delhi on February 27.

Why do riots erupt?

The Delhi violence show that hate campaigns have consequences.

An inspired dissent

“It is said that this manifesto is more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and, if bel

Kanhaiya Kumar, then the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president, raising slogans at the JNU campus on March 3, 2016. The Delhi Police on January 14, 2019, filed its charge sheet against Kanhaiya Kumar and others in a sedition case lodged in 2016.

The plague of sedition

The Supreme Court of India has upheld the obsolete colonial law of sedition, which was inspired by the racist ideology of the need to keep Indian rebe

Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz: A true South Asian

The Shaheen Baghs that sprang up all over India in protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act reclaimed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as truly one of us, a fig

Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane. He made a pointed reference to take over the PoK “if we get orders to that effect”.

The Atlas and the Army chief

The signs are many and disturbing that the Modi government may be contemplating military action to wrest Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Savarkar Sadan in Dadar, Mumbai. All those who were involved in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, including Nathuram Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte, had congregated here and often had long interviews with Savarkar.

Gandhi’s assassination

THE main witness against V.D. Savarkar in the Gandhi assassination case was the approver Digamber Badge. Two other witnesses corroborated his

Senior BJP leader L.K. Advani paying homage to Savarkar on his birth anniversary in Parliament House in New Delhi on May 28, 2014. Also seen is Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Savarkar & the BJP

What was Savarkar’s record in his 83 years to hail him as a hero? Six abject apologies to the British rulers, an unprecedented record in the entire hi

September 27, 1959: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a press conference in Washington, U.S.

The Khrushchev-Abbas dialogue

A conversation between Nikita S. Khrushchev, K.A. Abbas and Ali Sardar Jafri that took place in January 1960.

A photograph of the Babri Masjid from the early 1900s.

Supreme Court denies justice

What right, power and jurisdiction has the apex court of a secular state to direct the government to construct the house of worship of any community?

October 2, 1959: Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and Nikita S. Khrushchev, first Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, holding talks in Peking (Beijing). Also present are Liu Shao-Chi (left), Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC and M.A. Suslov (right), member of the presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Diplomacy & language

Lapses from civility are rare in diplomacy, but the diplomat’s reputation for care in the use of language has at times landed him in trouble.

A right royal snub

THE prize goes to the Chinese Emperor’s letter of October 3, 1973, to Britain’s insane King George III. It was sanitised by British officials. Here ar

Women from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica at a civil court in The Hague, the Netherlands, on July 16, 2014. The court declared the country liable in the deaths of more than 300 Bosnian Muslim men murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in the town in 1995 and ordered the government to pay compensation to their widows and families.

Rule of law & Army

In international law, the state and its organ, the army, are held accountable for any wrongdoing. Not so in India where the army enjoys impunity throu