The sound of jackboots, Hungary style

"Prime Minister Viktor Orban is using his powers to impose a regressive agenda"

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : The sound of jackboots, Hungary style: Only eight years after ending communist rule and joining EU, Hungary, from its first avatar as the European Coal and Steel Community, is marching back to quasi-Fascism or worse, in a development of the very kind the EU was intended to prevent.

The new Hungarian constitution almost certainly breach the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the separate European Convention on Human Rights. Yet the EU looks helpless over flagrant transgressions by a member state. Its only elected body, the European Parliament, remains deafeningly silent.

If the EU cannot deal robustly with its own errant members, then its citizens could soon hear the jackboots echoing a long way west of the Danube.

Calcutta's ambivalent inheritance

"Transforming its urban spaces requires an acknowledgement of the city's unique character and its history."

There has been very little funding from the West Bengal government — because of ideological and political reasons — for the ‘culture' for which Calcutta is still incongruously famous. And there is little from the Centre: as if Calcutta's contribution to national culture has no proven basis. To this, local intellectuals have added their earnest, often predictably academic, testimony to that culture's irrelevance. The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Calcutta's ambivalent inheritance

Why Norway should back down

"There is something deeply disturbing about the superiority and moral authority in the attitude of the country's Child Protection Services to child rearing practices of immigrants; it harks back to darker, less civil and, one would have hoped, long bygone times."

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Why Norway should back down: The ongoing case in which the Child Protection Services (CPS) in Stavanger, Norway, have placed two Indian children in a foster home raises important questions about not only the judgment of the representatives of a so-called model state, but also their lack of respect for the possibility that many questions around child care and upbringing may not have definitive answers and therefore a moral basis for passing verdicts about the right and wrong of a wide range of parenting practices.

Close encounters of the troubling kind

"Fake encounters are nothing but cold-blooded, brutal murders by persons who are supposed to uphold the law" death penalty was prescribed by Supreme Court — for involving in an act of extra-judicial killing.

The Hindu : Opinion / Editorial : Close encounters of the troubling kind: "As a way of dealing with the perceived pressure of public opinion following terror strikes or violent crimes, police forces across India sometimes resort to the custodial murder of prime suspects, often with a nudge and a wink from the top."


If the law does not deter criminal acts by those in authority, we are in deep trouble as a society.

Time to come out

"The Centre's embarrassing gaffe in the Supreme Court signals one thing clearly — that it will not take a clear and unambiguous position on the issue of decriminalising homosexuality. "
The Hindu : Opinion / Editorial : Time to come out: The Home Ministry's clarification, which distanced itself from the retrograde and irrational positions staked out by the Additional Solicitor General who “unauthorisedly” represented it, is a classic piece of equivocation.

This fence sitting must end. The state has no right to regulate or ban love or physical intimacy between consenting adults. Why should it be so hard to say that?